Corbin Carroll Is One of the Best Players of the Last Century

He plays for a first-place team and leads the league in slugging, OPS, OPS+ and win probability added, so it’s about time you consider him an MVP front-runner. No, it’s not Ronald Acuña Jr. of the Braves. It is Corbin Carroll of the Diamondbacks, the phenomenal rookie who has closed what was a huge gap between Acuña and the field in the MVP race.

Here is the tell-tale sign of true talent: The more pitchers see Carroll (and the more teams game-plan to stop him) the more they cannot figure him out. Carroll, an extra-base machine, is posting a monster June (.349/.414/.794) while creating his usual havoc on the bases with his elite speed.

At this rate—and especially as Arizona creates daylight in front of a Dodgers team in transition that will win closer to 90 games than its usual 100—Carroll has a fighting chance to join Fred Lynn (1974) and Ichiro Suzuki (2001) as the only players to win the Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards in the same season. He and the D-Backs are that good.

Carroll played in his 100th career game Saturday. Few players in the history of the game have made a 100-game impact with a combination of power and speed like Carroll. Start with this: The complete list of players with at least 19 homers and 21 stolen bases in their first 100 games:

A little too arbitrary for you? Fine. Let’s consider the best 100-game OPS since 1900 among players with the nice, round number of 20 stolen bases:

Nap Lajoie and John McGraw? Dudes born in 1874 and 1873? Whoa. We’re talking rare. That list puts Carroll among the three best 100-game starts in the past 100 years, at least among players with decent speed.

Too esoteric for you? O.K., try this. Simple. Mike Trout is the gold standard for great phenoms of this generation. Compare Carroll to Trout at the 100-game mark:

Um, Carroll is off to a better 100-game start than the Millville Meteor. Let that sink in.

Now let’s consider the entire universe of rookies who posted a .900 OPS with 40 steals. Don’t worry. It’s a short list:

What makes Carroll so special? He is a humble grinder who Arizona manager Torey Lovullo says shows up every day looking to get better. His skills are extraordinary. Carroll and Matt Vierling of the Tigers are the only qualified players who rank in the 80th percentile or better in max exit velocity, whiff rate and speed.

He is a 22-year-old throwback who hits with a below-average launch angle (11.2 degrees) and uses the whole field. (His hits by field: 30 to the pull side, 25 up the middle and 20 to the opposite field.) His swing is so technically sound with the way he swings on a level path through the zone that he is the rare young player who crushes high fastballs. In fact, Carroll slugs all kinds of fastballs better than everyone in baseball except Aaron Judge:

So, let’s take the 100-game inventory of Carroll. He has a combination of power and speed like few players in the past century, he is off to a better start than Trout, he slugs fastballs like Judge and he is the player most responsible for his team sitting in first place, just as was Lynn and Suzuki. The Red Sox improved by 11 wins in Lynn’s double-award season and the Mariners by 25 wins in Ichiro’s “Hello, world” season. With Carroll, the D-Backs, winners of just 74 games last season, should slot somewhere in between in terms of win improvement. It’s time for the Dodgers and the rest of us to take Carroll and the D-Backs very seriously.