Taking a little break from the Josh Barfield stuff to focus for a moment (since we’re in that general frame of mind already) on Sean Burroughs. Last February I compared Burroughs to HOFer George Brett. Long story short: I said that Burroughs would need to hit about .285/.318/.416 last year to duplicate Brett’s output as a rookie in 1974. Burroughs, as we know, ended up at .271/.317/.323. Those first two numbers are pretty dead-on. The slugging percentage, obviously, was a bit lacking.

I also noted that Burroughs would need to ht roughly .312/.353/.511 this year to match what Brett did in his second season (again, adjusted for league offensive levels). Well, as we near the end of the season, Burroughs is hitting .300/.366/.422. So he’s getting on base a little better than Brett did at the same age, but still not driving the ball with as much authority.

Then in May of last year I ran some numbers using the 1996 Sickels data that I’m using to come up with comps for Barfield (gonna milk that dataset dry!) and came up with the following list of players as comps for Burroughs:

• Trey Beamon
• Roger Cedeno
• Richard Hidalgo
• Derek Jeter
• Edgar Renteria
• Dmitri Young

Hidalgo is on Barfield’s list as well: an odd, though not necessarily informative, coincidence. I probably should wait till the season is over to do this but what the heck. Let’s see how Burroughs’ line in his second big-league season compares with theirs:

             Age  AB  OBP  SLG  AVG  ISO BB/K XB/H
T. Beamon     23  65 .309 .323 .277 .046 .118 .167
S. Burroughs  22 434 .366 .422 .300 .122 .582 .285
R. Cedeno     22 194 .362 .392 .273 .119 .568 .283
R. Hidalgo    23 383 .328 .420 .227 .193 .767 .483
D. Jeter      23 654 .370 .405 .291 .114 .592 .253
E. Renteria   21 617 .327 .340 .277 .063 .417 .164
D. Young      24 536 .364 .481 .310 .171 .500 .380

This pair is particularly interesting:

             Age  AB  OBP  SLG  AVG  ISO BB/K XB/H
S. Burroughs  22 434 .366 .422 .300 .122 .582 .285
D. Jeter      23 654 .370 .405 .291 .114 .592 .253

Just for grins, here are Jeter’s two subsequent seasons:

Age  AB  OBP  SLG  AVG  ISO BB/K XB/H
 24 626 .384 .481 .324 .157 .479 .256
 25 627 .438 .552 .349 .203 .784 .320

What does any of this mean? I have no idea. And I certainly hope I’m not doing Burroughs a disservice by comparing him to an established star like Jeter. But isn’t it fun to look at how another player who put up similar numbers at a similar stage in his career ended up developing, and wonder what might be?