Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images

Reasonable people can disagree on who the best draft prospect of the 21st century is. I think there’s a pretty good case for Adley Rutschman: A switch-hitter with patience and power, a plus defender at a premium position, a College World Series champion who’d been tested repeatedly against the toughest amateur competition in the world and come out on top routinely.

I get why you’d want the tantalizing upside of Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Mark Prior, but to me no other prospect combined a big league starter-level floor with the ceiling of a superstar the way Rutschman did.

In his first two seasons in the majors, Rutschman hit .268/.369/.439 with a 13.6% walk rate. That’s a wRC+ of 129, on a heavy workload for a catcher. In two seasons, he produced 11.1 WAR, placing him, already, halfway up the career WAR leaderboard for no. 1 overall picks.

At that point, something unusual would have had to happen for Rutschman not to make the Hall of Fame. Forgive me for digressing, but I do want to reinforce the idea that we can identify future Hall of Famers much more quickly than you might think. In the modern era in AL/NL play, only 23 position players — including Rutschman — have totaled 10 or more WAR in their first two big league seasons.

It’s pretty wild how many of these guys played together: Pesky and Williams; Trout and Pujols; Waner and both Vaughan and Wright, in different stints. DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Keller, and Stirnweiss all played together on the Yankees, first with Gordon and later with Mize.

I’ll save you the trouble of counting: That’s 12 actual Hall of Famers, plus two more slam-dunk candidates who aren’t on the ballot yet — Pujols and Trout. Of the remaining 11 players, we’ve got two young active All-Stars in Rutschman and Rodríguez; two Hall of Very Good guys in Berger and Keller; and Longoria, who might end up in the Hall of Fame or might not.

What does it take to go from a start like Rutschman’s to something less than a 40-plus WAR career? One of three things. First, injury. Wright was one of the best young shortstops in baseball in the late 1920s, then he messed up his shoulder and — because this was before surgery was invented — was a spent force by age 30. Even in modern times, injury is always a looming threat, especially for a catcher.

Second, global war. Admittedly, this is more likely to affect Rutschman’s career now than it seemed when he made his big league debut, but it’s still a long shot.

Pesky’s first two seasons in the majors were the two best of his career, and they were separated by three seasons of military service during World War II. (I mentioned Pesky’s predicament in an article about the Hall of Fame chances of Gunnar Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr. in January 2024.) Stirnweiss is on this list because of a 9.0-WAR season in 1944, which he followed up with an 8.8-WAR season in 1945. After that, the stars started filtering out of the military and back into the major leagues — including Gordon, whose spot Stirnweiss had been keeping warm — and Snuffy never posted a league-average wRC+ again.

That’s everyone but Bryant. So the three great calamities a young star can suffer are: Injury, World War II, and signing with the Rockies.

Starting in mid-2024, it looked the Rutschman was headed to one of the less desirable outcomes. He wore down badly during the second half of that season; he had a 123 wRC+ at the break and a 69 wRC+ afterward. He went 1-for-8 in the Orioles’ two-game Wild Card series loss to the Royals.

The opponent during that series is significant, because it placed Rutschman in contrast with the player selected after him: Witt. While I was in Baltimore for that series, I had a conversation with another writer about whether the Orioles had picked the wrong guy. It was the first time I had seriously considered a take that is, a little less than two years later, now undeniably correct.

At the time, I brought up the most famous draft miss in sports history: the Portland Trail Blazers taking Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan in the 1984 NBA Draft. No one mentions that the Houston Rockets also passed on Jordan, and with good reason: They used the no. 1 overall pick on Hakeem Olajuwon. Even if Witt ended up being the better player, I expected Rutschman to keep it close.

But things kept heading in the wrong direction in 2025. Rutschman was limited to 90 games by a pesky oblique strain, and when he was on the field, he hit an anemic .220/.307/.366. The standards for offense at catcher are such that he was still on course for about 2 WAR over a full season, but this was veering uncomfortably close to “the floor for a great college catcher with pop is Mike Zunino” territory.

Most concerning: The Orioles extended a young catcher, but it was Samuel Basallo, not Rutschman. For the first time, the face of the franchise started popping up in trade rumors. Was Rutschman bound for the Kris Bryant Highway and not Cooperstown?

Fear not. Heading into Wednesday night’s game against Boston, Rutschman was hitting .253/.337/.462, which doesn’t sound especially impressive, but it’s a 124 wRC+. In 43 games, he’s already eclipsed his WAR total from 2025, and is performing on par with his level in his first two seasons. Which is to say: A Hall of Fame trajectory.

Baseball Savant’s percentile graphs can be a little misleading, but a look at Rutschman’s tells you what skills did not desert him during the dark days: His defense, his plate discipline, and his bat control. He remains an elite defender — especially as a thrower and framer — which papers over a lot of offensive deficiencies.

Rutschman’s interior-lineman-sized lower half belies his strength as a hitter. He’s got plenty of pop, but it’s more above average rather than Cal Raleigh-type plus-plus power. Rutschman has never hit more than 20 homers in a season. But he’s also never struck out more than 18.3% of the time. With the exception of that brutal 2024 campaign, he’s never run a single-digit walk rate or an above-average chase rate.

In 2026, those skills remain, but he’s no longer hitting like someone who’s either exhausted, playing through a core injury, or both. Rutschman still isn’t swinging like Oneil Cruz, but he’s added at least a mile an hour of bat speed on both sides of the plate, and he’s replaced a lot of slow, uncompetitive swings with faster rips through the zone.

The result: career highs in HardHit%, ISO, barrel rate, and xwOBA. He’s on pace to challenge the 20-homer mark again. Rutschman has already had one IL stint this season — a 10-gamer for ankle inflammation back in April — but if he stays healthy from here on out, he should be back in the 5-WAR range once again.

Turns out there was nothing to worry about after all. He’ll be fine, unless World War III happens.