It's Early - But There is Reason to Be Worried About Evan White

There have been quite a few surprise performances among our many young Mariners this season. Kyle Lewis looks like a superstar. JP Crawford has been one of the best shortstops in the game. Dylan Moore looks like he might actually be good. Those are some of the pluses. Unfortunately for us there have been plenty of negatives as well, headlined by Top-100 Prospect Evan White.

Clearly there are reasons to give White the benefit of the doubt. He's just 24 years old. We are looking at his first 77 Major League plate appearances. He is making a jump from Double-A. This year has been about as weird it can get. He's an unbelievable defender. And his average Exit Velocity of 91.1 places him in the 79th percentile.

That said, I do feel that there has been a tendency to under-react to his performance so far. Of course there is only so much we can do with 77 plate appearances. No one should be giving up or declaring him a bust, so please keep in mind that I am not saying anything like that. But we do have the ability to pull up some data and get some idea of the company he is currently keeping.

I went to Fangraphs and pulled rookie seasons since 2000 (fairly arbitrary, but anything would be, and I did not feel like sorting through every rookie season since 1871). I also excluded pitchers, for obviously reasons. I then narrowed in further to only show campaigns of between 50 and 100 plate appearances, because White is currently at 77. This also isn't perfect, but it should at least give us a fairly representative sample of players.

This next part isn't fun: White's current wRC+ of 2 is the 25th worst in our sample of 621. The group ranges from Tyler Ladendorf's -59 wRC+ in 2016 all the way up to Jarrett Parker's 219 in 2015.

Now, that tells you something right away - your first 100 plate appearances by no means totally predict your future. Jarrett Parker was Barry Bonds for those 54 PA's. He's now a Quad-A type. But still, when looking at the larger sample we can get some indications.

Here are the players who come out worse than White in wRC+:

One bright spot is Kolten Wong, who comes in at -2 wRC+ over 62 PA. He's gone on to be about a league average hitter, which is nice for a 2nd baseman - less so for a 1st baseman, even with elite defense. Some of these players flamed out. Some might still be kicking around in the minors or as Quad-A types. And Hanser Alberto might actually be decent! (96 wRC+ last year, 155 so far this year). But overall it's not an inspiring group.

As I mentioned, this was a pretty massive data set, so I will link it if anyone wants to look through it. I'm sure there are other examples of players who had terrible starts and ended up succeeding. On balance, though, it seems clear that having a dreadful start is not a positive sign for one's future career.

Also included in that set is the career stats of players since 2000 who struck out over 40% of the time in their rookie seasons (White is currently at 44.2% as I write this - worst in the league). There are a few bright spots - Jayson Werth, Jose Bautista, Aaron Judge, Javy Baez, and Joey Gallo. Tom Murphy appears as well, and he was a very solid hitter last year. Tyler O'Neill and Franchy Cordero show up, and they still show promise. Jack Cust had a decent career, his time with the Mariners notwithstanding.

However, when we again look at the group as a whole, it is not particularly reassuring. The average career wRC+ among players who struck out over 40% of the time in their rookie seasons is 85. Many of these players have either totally flamed out or become AAA org filler types.

Once again, none of this guarantees anything about Evan White. He is hitting the ball hard, which means if he figures out how to make more consistent contact, things could turn around rather significantly. And I can't claim to know whether it is better for him to just stick it out this year, or head down to Tacoma to play fake games against his own teammates.

But I do think it is important to be realistic and dispel the idea that his performance so far is fine because he is a rookie. Not all rookies look like this, and he can't just set our watch to him figuring things out.