Yankee catcher Gary Sanchez has been a sensation since his call-up at the beginning of August. So much so that, on Saturday’s Yankees-Red Sox telecast, Fox broadcaster John Smoltz (whom I much admire for his easy-to-listen-to voice and his thoughtful and often insightful commentary) uncharacteristically gushed something to the effect that Sanchez’s month-and-a-half of stellar play leading the Yankees back into the pennant chase was pretty much unheard of for a rookie. That seemed like quite a bold claim and one that would be worth looking into.

After the jump, more on Sanchez and other rookies who started their careers with a short season but a memorable one.

To check out Smoltz’s assertion, I looked for the best OPS+ in short rookie seasons, which I defined as at least 150 PA but less than 300. The twelve best seasons meeting that bill, all with at least 160 OPS+, are shown below (there’s a bit of a drop-off after that with the next best season at 155 OPS+).

So Sanchez fits right in the middle of this group of the best similar career starts. To take it a step further and identify which of these players may have impacted a pennant race as Sanchez has, there are a few examples:

• Catcher Johnny Schulte played his first games for the defending world champion Cardinals at the end of May, going 5 for 8 against the Reds. Schulte didn’t play much in June, but still contributed three home runs, added three more in July, again in limited playing time, and another 3 dingers after returning from an injury in September. Schulte started most of the Cardinal games from September 7th to season’s end as St. Louis closed 20-8 to almost wrest the NL title from the Pirates, falling just 1½ games short.
• Bob “Hurricane” Hazle played his first game for the world champion-to-be Braves on July 29 with Milwaukee tied for the NL lead. The Braves won that game and 14 of the next 15 to take an 8 game lead (which is how the race ended, though Milwaukee briefly made it interesting, allowing their lead to shrink to 2½ games on Sep 15 before a 10-2 finish salted the title away). Milwaukee’s torrid pace over the first half of August coincided with Hazle’s .545/.583/.879 clip over his first 11 games, all of which the Braves won. Hazle’s rookie season BA, OBP and OPS are all the top marks in a short season of 150-300 PA, whether by a rookie or any other player, while his 209 OPS+ is second only to Gavvy Cravath‘s 213 mark at age 38 in 1919.
• Two years later, Willie McCovey got called up at the end of July and started with a 4 hit game that included two triples, still the only such career debut game. San Francisco won that game to take over the league lead, and won 7 of the next 8 to solidify their hold on top spot, a lead they would maintain in a three team race for 52 straight days. Alas, a 1-7 finish handed the title to the Dodgers, a swoon that came despite a .364/.391/.682 slash by McCovey over that stretch (no pun intended).
• Frank Thomas came up to the Sox at the beginning of August 1990 and played pretty much full time until the end of the season. Chicago wasn’t going to catch the defending world championship A’s but a 94-68 finish was easily their best since going to the ALCS seven years before. The White Sox finished strong with a 14-6 mark to close out the season, led by Thomas’s .364/.494/.561 clip over that stretch.

Is a rookie season like Sanchez’s a predictor of good things to come? To find out I’ve expanded our group of twelve to a more substantial sample size of the top 50 (and ties) for OPS+ scores in short rookie seasons. That group of 51 has a minimum OPS+ of 138 that will almost certainly accommodate Sanchez even if he were to slump badly the rest of the way.

So, how did this larger group do after that impressive rookie season? Here are the top 10 WAR totals of that group over their first 5 seasons, excluding seasons with rookie status, which, as it turns out, are also the only players to compile 10 WAR over that period.

There is, of course, quite a range of PAs so I’ve added the WAR rate stat for this part of these players’ careers. Nobody in this group should have been in any danger of being unable to find work, as their WAR rates over a minimum qualifying season are all comfortably above replacement level, with all but the two active players (Santana and Lawrie) at 3 WAR or better, a very creditable contribution on almost any team.

Of note is that only three of these ten players made the first list of twelve who posted a 160 OPS+ in their rookie season. Two of the other nine (Clarke and Barberie) from that first list were in the top half of the 46 in the group of 51 who are not active rookies (the remaining five being Sanchez, Trea Turner, Ryan Schimpf, Ryon Healy plus Sanchez’s Yankee teammate Greg Bird, who is no longer a rookie but has had no playing time since his rookie season). The rest of our group of twelve from the first list finished in the bottom half of the larger group, which includes everybody with 4.4 WAR or less over this part of their careers.

Looking now at the 39 retired players in our larger group, their median 6.6 career WAR total may appear underwhelming, but the top 10 (half of the top half) all show a very respectable 20+ career WAR. Reducing that group of 39 to the 29 who compiled 1000 career PA moves that top quartile up to 27 WAR, significantly better than the 19 WAR top quartile for all retired position players with 1000 career PA.

So, where does that leave Sanchez? Well, being in a group of twelve (our first list) that includes two HOFers can’t be bad. Also encouraging is that our second list of ten includes a third HOFer, with the other six retired players all having name recognition. And, as noted above, the third list shows a top quartile career WAR over 40% higher than the overall major league average for 1000 PA careers.

For the glass-half-empty crowd, one can’t overlook that one third of the players in the first list (Nicholson, Paschal, Schulte and Hazle) failed to reach 1000 PA for their careers, as did one-quarter of the retired players in the larger group of 51. There’s probably no better example of a career fizzling after a hot start than the top name (Bob Hazle) on our first list of 10; after setting short season records that still stand, Hazle played just one more season of only 129 PA and a .211/.302/.281 slash.

Time will tell how Sanchez’s career turns out, but his fast start shouldn’t be dismissed as being meaningless. Based on players with comparable career starts,  their career totals are clearly superior to the major league average. Thus, Yankee fans have reason for optimism and anticipation of what the future may hold for Sanchez.