During a recent Twins broadcast, Dick Bremer noted that when Miguel Sano was the same age—in years and days—as Nelson Cruz on the day Cruz hit his first home run in the major leagues, Sano had already hit 100 homers (or maybe he said "about 100 homers," I'm not sure). Fact checking Dick, I find that he is, not surprisingly, correct. I don't know the date on which Cruz hit his first big-league homer, but both he and Sano were born during the baseball season—Cruz in July, Sano in May. Cruz hit his first homer in 2006, during the season he turned 26. He finished that season with 6 home runs. Sano just finished the season in which he turned 26 with 118 career homers.
Rooting around just a little, it's pretty clear to me that, with respect to the normal career development of a baseball slugger, Cruz's case is the unusual one. For example, Harmon Killebrew's birthday was June 29, and Harmon finished the 1962 baseball season, the one in which he turned 26, with 178 career home runs. So it's not as if Sano is on track to obliterate records. It's that Cruz is a late bloomer.
Killebrew's last season, 1975, was the one in which he turned 39. Harmon hit 14 homers that year. Cruz turned 39 last July 1 and finished the season with 41 homers. In the last five years of his career, Harmon hit 86 homers. Over the past five seasons Cruz has hit 204 home runs. If we define "second half of 30s" as the five baseball seasons during which the two men had their 35th through 39th birthdays, then the home run comparison for the second half of their 30s is: Cruz, 204; Killebrew, 86.
The comparison at the front end of their careers is similarly striking. Cruz hit his first 6 big-league homers in the year he turned 26. I've noted that Harmon finished the corresponding season with 178 career homers. It's also true that in the year he turned 26 Harmon led the American League with 48 homers. It was the second time he had led the league in homers. He'd won the home run crown three years earlier, with 42 in 1959, and in the intervening two seasons had hammered out 77 more.
Cruz's career now extends over 15 seasons, from when he was 25 to 39. If you project his average home run total over the last five seasons across his whole career, he'd have 600 big-league home runs. His actual total is 401. Good luck finding another player who was more productive from ages 35 to 39 than from 25 to 34. Cruz, however, has been way more productive in his late 30s than he was in his late 20s. I think he's probably the most remarkable late bloomer in the history of the game. Ted Williams batted .388 in 1957, the year he turned 39—but, then, he'd batted .406 sixteen years earlier, when he was 23. Cruz was 25 when he played in his first big-league game.
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