Collette Calls: All the Juniors

The list of players hitting 35 or more homers in their age-21 season can be tracked by anyone not named Jason Pierre Paul or Mordecai Brown using two hands. Baseball seasons, when incorporating ages, concern players who maintain that age until July 1 of any season. There have been exactly nine players who meet this criteria in the history of baseball, and we are witnessing one of them this season:

Junior Caminero has a good chance to surpass the modern-day record set by Ronald Acuna Jr. during the rabbit ball season of 2019 over the final 37 games the Rays have remaining on their schedule. His overall numbers may end up looking like those which Tony Armas posted in 1984 as the only player in history to hit 40 or more home runs with an OBP of .300 or lower. Armas led the league that season in home runs, RBI, strikeouts and total bases, while Caminero has no chance of catching Shohei Ohtanin in total bases or the tag team of Kyle Schwarber and Cal Raleigh in RBI. 

This should not take away from how special a season Caminero is having considering how polarizing he was this previous draft season. His ADP range by NFBC league type was all over the board:

It really should not surprise anyone if Caminero sneaks into the first round at some point in the 2026 draft season seeing as he's currently 15th overall on our Earned Auction Value calculator, tied with the likes of Julio Rodriguez, Eugenio Suarez, Francisco Lindor and Garrett Crochet. I would almost go as far as confidently stating that Caminero will be a first-round pick in multiple leagues based off recent history.

However, we need to adjust the criteria slightly to get to a recent history lesson. If I adjust the StatHead pull to show me all players with 35-plus home runs up to their age-22 season, we get some more recent examples to leverage in this discussion, with a few more juniors mixed in:

That list has been truncated to the most recent 15, but there are only 25 instances overall, beginning with Mel Ott in 1929, including seven current Hall of Famers (Ott, Foxx, DiMaggio, Williams, Mathews, Robinson, Bench), eventual Hall of Famers in Albert Pujols, Mike Trout, Manny Machado, and Bryce Harper, as well as Cody Bellinger, Ronald Acuna Jr...and Alex Rodriguez. Caminero is keeping excellent company thus far and is tracking toward becoming just the 12th player to hit 40 or more home runs in a season before his age-23 season.

The record belongs to the player who is the reason why I decided to focus on this topic today, because of the multiple similarities in their stories: Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who hit 48 home runs in 2021. Like Caminero, Guerrero Jr.'s draft-day price was widely debated, and the range between his minimum and maxium pick prior to the 2021 season was wide:

Guerrero Jr. went on to be a first-round value while hitting .311/.401/.601 with the aforementioned 48 home runs, 111 runs driven in and 123 runs scored that season while playing his home games in three different stadiums due to the Canadian Covid-19 restrictions. Guerrero Jr. hit 11 home runs while playing in Dunedin and 10 each while at Rogers Centre as well as Sahlen Field in Buffalo. Interesting note: his furthest west home run came in Kansas City, and Guerrero Jr. failed to homer in 13 stadiums that season, including none in nine games at Tropicana Field.

That production changed Guerrero Jr.'s draft status the following season to this:

Yet, by season's end, Guerrero Jr. had produced $27 of fantasy value, as his overall line fell to .274/.339/.480 with 32 home runs, 97 runs driven in and 90 runs scored. That is still a very good performance, but the loss of the 21 games in Dunedin (where he hit .410/.521/.897) and the 23 games at Sahlen Field (where he hit .321/.418/.762) were clearly missed.

That same season, Fernando Tatis Jr. also hit 35-plus homers in his age-22 season, but his effort was more impressive than Guerrero Jr.'s overall total because Tatis Jr. hit 42 homers in 130 games before shutting his season down in late August due to an acute shoulder injury which required season-ending surgery. Fantasy managers, despite knowing Tatis Jr. was going to miss one or even two months of the season in 2022, rostered him as such that spring:

Yes, Tatis Jr went first overall in at least two drafts despite managers knowing he would, at best, miss the first four to six weeks of the season. Tatis Jr. infamously went on to miss the entire 2022 season after being popped for performance-enhancing drugs during his rehab and never took a swing in the majors that season. 

I would like to stick with the "Junior" theme here, but Ronald Acuna Jr. is not a clean situation given the fact his massive season came in the 2019 season with the bouncy baseball and his subsequent season was impacted by the Covid-19 shortened-season. I would only point out that Acuna Jr.'s fantasy production dropped from $39 in standard mixed leagues in 2019 to $26 during the 2020 season. I also find it amusing that the last four players to hit 35 or more homers in a single season prior to their age-23 season each has Junior incorporated in their legal name. 

The table below shows what each of the 14 previous players to do what Caminero is doing now did in the following season: 

Not one of these players was able to repeat their value the following season, with only Mike Trout coming close to doing so. Torres could not repeat his Camden-infused magic — since 13 of his homers came in Baltimore that season — while Machado went from 20 steals to 0 steals the following season while maintaining his power production. The others all had different flavors of injury.

That brings us back to Caminero. The hope is that the Rays are back in Tropicana Field next season, but even at this date, nothing is a lock. The season in a minor-league park has not helped Caminero with home runs as much as it did Guerrero Jr., as 18 of Caminero's 35 home runs have come at Steinbrenner Field. Where things get interesting is with everything else, because Caminero currently has a 300-point split between his .979 OPS at Steinbrenner Field his .679 OPS playing anywhere else. The .323/.359/.620 home line looks amazing, while the .194/.240/.439 line on the road raises questions. He walks more on the road (6.2 percent vs. 4.9 percent) but strikes out more on the road (22.5 percent vs 19.2 percent) as well. 

A look at his home versus road spray charts hints at more of a willingness to go hit the ball to where it's pitched compared to a more pull-focused approach on the road:

We all know Tropicana Field is not exactly the friendlist hitting park in the business, and I'm afraid that Caminero's 2025 production is writing checks his 2026 bat will not be able to cash. Caminero will get to 40 homers this season barring injury or a massive slump, but remember recent history for how these players performed the following season before staring long and hard at Caminero sitting there on the turn between the first and second round next season before pulling the trigger on what will very likely be a letdown in 2026. There is a reason why fantasy analysts who do projections tend to be pessimistic after big seasons, because history tells us what goes up must come down. The Rays fan in me loves watching the in-season growth Caminero has made, especially with his defense, this season. However, you will not see me taking him if I'm at the back end of the draft unless he makes it back to me in the third round.