Sneaking Up on the Competition With Carlos Correa

Astros shortstop Carlos Correa turned 21 years old just three days ago. That would have been a much more dramatic opening line if we weren’t living through the Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Manny Machado Era, but it’s a relatively dramatic opening nonetheless. Correa has looked like one of MLB’s premier players over his first 90 games and 390 plate appearances all while being younger than Bryce Harper. And Bryce Harper is very young.

It’s not much of a surprise that Carlos Correa is a great baseball player. In fact, Correa was supposed to be a great player. He was taken first overall by the Astros in 2012, and while some people saw it as a way to free up money for later picks, no one disputed him as a top-level draft target. Correa’s been an elite prospect his entire career, occupying the fifth spot on Kiley’s Top 200 entering the season, and the third spot on the Baseball Prospectus and ESPN (Insider) lists.

The particularly remarkable aspect of Correa’s 2015 season is not that he’s hitting 32% better than league average or that he’s gathered 3.1 WAR in under 400 plate appearances; the remarkable part is that he’s doing so in 2015. While Correa’s potential was widely acknowledged, no one really seemed to expect it to arrive so soon. Kiley filed a report on him in October of 2014, giving him present Hit and Game Power grades of 20 to go along with a “2017 ETA.”

It’s easy to forget that Correa fractured his fibula last June, and while his recovery seemed to be on track, he hadn’t spent a single day in Double-A when the 2015 season started and only had 1,016 professional plate appearances to his name. Even if you loved Correa as a prospect, you probably didn’t expect that he’d tear up the majors at age 20 just one year after breaking his leg. That’s just not a very likely path.

I want to make sure you’re clear that even some of our most trusted public scouts didn’t really see Correa as a big contributor for 2015, mostly because I’m about to show you his preseason ZiPS projection which is laughable next to his actual line. Over 431 plate appearances, ZiPS projected a .247/.311/.357 slash line, amounting to a 91 wRC+ and 1.6 WAR. That’s a perfectly fine age-20 season for a guy who hadn’t played above High-A.

We’re all on board with the idea that projection systems are a little less useful when it comes to predicting young players with very little MLB experience, but ZiPS said almost exactly what Kiley did: “Not this year, kid.”

Of course, you know that both assessments were incorrect. Correa has taken the league by storm and his 132 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR tell plenty of the story, but I also can’t seem to go an entire day on Twitter without seeing a tweet that features some comment about Correa’s exit velocity or a hard hit ball that he recently struck. An example, literally from yesterday:

Carlos Correa has more batted balls w\ an exit velocity of 110MPH+ (12) than the Braves as a team have had all year (9). Hes played 90 games

— Daren Willman (@darenw) September 24, 2015

He’s dominating way ahead of schedule. The projection systems are improving their forecasts, albeit slowly, and Kiley has even bumped him up from a 65 future value player to a 75 future value player after seeing the first few months of the year, essentially elevating him to match Kris Bryant as the best graduating prospect.

To summarize, Correa was a good prospect that people didn’t expect to see for at least another year. He played so well in the minors to start the season that he earned a post-Super Two promotion to help the Astros make a run at the postseason. By the time he was called up, everyone was in agreement that we was close to ready, but there wasn’t necessarily a sense that he was ready to be a star player in his first year. He was probably going to be good enough to help the Astros fill a big hole at short, but I don’t think many people really expected All-Star caliber play immediately.

Correa was good right away. Not only were the numbers good, but he did impressive things like hitting an inside pitch extremely hard. And then he did more things, leading Jeff to wonder if he was already the best shortstop in baseball. One season of data doesn’t define an entire position, but the only primary shorstop with a higher wRC+ this year than Correa (minimum zero plate appearances) is Corey Seager who is at 193 wRC+ in 81 PA. Correa is fifth in WAR among shortstops, trailing Xander Bogaerts, Brandon Crawford, Jung-ho Kang, and fellow exciting rookie Francisco Lindor. And our WAR value treats Correa as a slightly below average defender at the position, which may not be the case.

I find Correa’s season to be particularly interesting because Correa turned out to be ahead of everyone’s expectations. When Kris Bryant was called up in April, there seemed to be a consensus that he was ready to be a force at the plate, and pitchers treated him like one. Correa seemed to sort of sneak up on everyone despite his name recognition.

In his first four games, he hit sixth, sixth, fifth, and sixth. He had a 189 wRC+in 16 PA with no walks. Not that you should care about 16 PA, but after those four games he moved to the second spot in the order and has hit second or third in every game since. That’s one small sign that someone took notice that Correa was beyond his years.

But most interestingly, you can also see the league catching on to “Carlos Correa, Already Good Hitter,” as well. Observe some selected splits for the first half of the season and the second half.

The walk column and Zone% column stand out. It’s nice to see the drop in strikeouts, but it’s really hard to miss the fact that pitchers seem to be approaching Correa much more carefully as the season goes on. At first, he was a prospect who was called up early because the Astros, as a team, were ahead of schedule and needed a shortstop, but the league has quickly learned that he’s already a bona fide hitter.

Admittedly, dropping a dividing line at the All-Star Game is arbitrary and was done mostly out of convenience. You can observe the same phenomenon in this graph of his cumulative walk rate. He doesn’t walk much at first, then they start walking him around game 25 and his rate climbs until about game 57 when it starts to settle in. Three stages: ignorance, “we just realized he’s amazing,” and equilibrium.

Let’s try the same thing, but in heat map form. We’ll use games 1-25, 26-57, and 58-90 as our splits because the graph just told us to:

Again, somewhat arbitrary, but the point holds. Correa saw a lot more pitchers in the zone, especially inside, when he got to the majors and then pitchers stayed away for about a month before coming back into the zone to some extent.

What we have here is a pretty tidy story about Correa’s rise. We all thought he’d be great, but we didn’t expect him to be great right away. As a result, the scouts, projections, and pitchers treated his 2015 season as if he was in the majors ahead of his time and was just hoping to out perform Marwin Gonzalez and Jonathan Villar. But not long after his debut, Kiley gave him a 65 present value grade with the potential to be a 75 future value player. His projections have improved. And pitchers started pitching him much more carefully.

The fun part about the story is that Correa didn’t really “get better.” A lot of what we write is about players who start performing differently with the authors looking to find an explanation. Correa just crushed his way through the minors and, despite a serious injury a year ago, was able to translate that into major league success right away. Nothing changed for Correa, he just didn’t take as long to arrive as we all expected.

This remains one of the more fascinating parts of the game for me. It doesn’t surprise me that some players are better than others age 20, but figuring out how to distinguish similar players is challenging. There are some players who own the minors just like Correa did through age 19 and arrive in the show at 20 or 21 and aren’t yet up to the task. That’s the norm. But sometimes you wind up with a Trout, Harper, Correa, etc., who don’t need more seasoning and don’t miss a beat.

I’m not sure we have a good way to predict which players are which, but it’s also not likely to be related to luck if they’re given more than a cup of coffee. Some players dominate in the minors and struggle in the majors while some players are unimpressive in the minors and perform well in the majors. Past isn’t always prologue for baseball players, but separating players with similar pasts is difficult. What made Correa succeed right away when many others, as we know from the projection Correa received, were mediocre to start?

I often advocate for giving those mediocre young players time to figure it out, but what qualities produce a player who is great right away compared to one who is eventually great after a significant adjustment period?

No matter the cause, the Astros have to be thrilled they made the call when they did. Correa is likely heading toward a Rookie of the Year award, and if his team makes the postseason, his three-to-four wins will certainly prove critical. There was a period of time in which choosing Correa over Byron Buxton in the draft looked like a mistake, but after an amazing 2015 season, it looks like the choice was a wise one.

The 2015 season started with the world talking about Kris Bryant, but it’s likely that Bryant and Correa will wind up both winning Rookies of the Year in the Year of the Rookie. Everyone expected Bryant to headline the class, but Correa has emerged nearly to the same extent. Bryant was supposed to be well ahead of Correa, but it turns out we got that one wrong and it was a matter of months, not years.