You can look at a young star and envision the rest of his career planned out like a script. You can see 300, 400, and 500 home runs before he’s even reached 100. The MVPs and All-Star appearances, the black ink on his baseball card, all of it imprints itself in your mind’s eye before it’s ever written. It almost never goes according to plan, of course. Two years ago, how many Orioles fans would’ve thought Gunnar Henderson would struggle to keep his on-base percentage above .300 and Adley Rutschman would be in Boston?

Predicting the career numbers of anyone under the age of 30 is a fool’s errand. Today, I’m just such a fool because I’m predicting that a current player in his age-22 season is going to break a career record in a counting stat: Junior Caminero is going to retire one day as the all-time leader in grounding into double plays. I feel more confident in this than I am that he won’t hit 763 home runs. Well, no, that’s hyperbole, but I still feel relatively sure of this, all things considered.

Caminero is in his second full season as the Rays’ third baseman. Last year, he became the second player in history to record 45 home runs at age 21 or younger, joining Eddie Mathews, who hit 47 at age 21 in 1953. This year, he’s leading the AL with 37 with a month to go. More importantly for our purposes, he grounded into 31 double plays last season, easily leading MLB and falling just five short of Jim Rice’s single-season record. This year, he’s sitting on 23 GIDP, four more than anyone else in MLB. He hit into four of them in his brief stints in 2023 and 2024, bringing his career total to 58, and he only turned 23 less than two months ago.