The Sporting News’ SN 140 project groups 10 early-arriving stars as baseball’s “Prodigies,” including Johnny Bench, the only position player to win a second MVP before 25, and Robin Yount, who played a record 243 major-league games as a teenager.
Other honorees are Bob Feller, Al Kaline, Iván Rodríguez, Chipper Jones, Eddie Mathews, Willie Wells, Juan Soto and Mel Ott. The feature notes Feller led MLB in strikeouts in all seven seasons from 1938 to 1948; Kaline’s 8.3 WAR in 1955 was then the highest for a position player aged 20 or younger; Rodríguez won 13 Gold Gloves and seven Silver Sluggers; Mathews hit 47 homers at 21; Soto hit his first 83 homers against older pitchers; and Ott had 40 homers and 150 RBIs at 20 in 1929, when his walk total led his league.
Jones accrued 85.3 WAR with the Braves, the most among No. 1 overall picks with the team that drafted them; Wells led his league in WAR for four consecutive seasons at ages 22–25. The SN 140 project organizes 140 players into 14 archetype-based groups rather than ranking them, after considering more than 500 candidates.
