Carlos Correa Has Arrived

Astros rookie shortstop Carlos Correa has only been in the major leagues for 10 games, but you might as well go ahead and hitch yourself to his bandwagon now, because he is extremely good and a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

Since is call up on June 8, Correa is hitting .349/.378/.628 with three home runs and three doubles. This isn’t the biggest sample size, but there’s nothing to suggest that Correa won’t continue putting up ridiculous numbers. He was the first pick in the 2012 draft, and has since dominated at every level of the minor leagues. He started this season in Double A, where he hit .385/.459/.726 in 133 plate appearances, and then went on to hit .276/.345/.449 during a 24-game stint in Triple A. This is why ESPN’s Keith Law rated him as the top prospect in all of baseball a little less than a month ago.

And now he’s in Houston, doing stuff like this:

And this:

That homer qualifies as a legitimate “Holy shit!” moment. Watch it again and look at how far off the plate the pitch was, and then think about how much strength and bat speed it takes to turn a pitch like that into a home run. That’s a pitch that very few players have any business hitting that hard.

The Astros just finished up a four-game sweep of the Rockies, during which Correa collected nine hits and just generally abused the Rockies in all facets of the game. In last night’s series finale, he hit an RBI double that one-hopped the fence in right-center, and also stole three bases, seemingly just for the hell of it.

Correa will certainly regress as the season goes along—four games against the Rockies can certainly pump up one’s stats—but the Astros seem to have found themselves a future All-Star at shortstop. He’s going to be manning the position for a while, too. He’s only 20 years old.