Andruw Jones hit two home runs in a World Series game at age 19. At age 21, he hit 31 home runs and stole 27 bases. While he continues to be one of the best defensive center fielders to ever play the game, Jones has failed in certain aspects to reach the potential he displayed at such a young age.

In 2001, while he won his fourth straight Gold Glove, he also struggled at the plate, hitting just .251 with a .312 on-base percentage, .461 slugging percentage and career-high 142 strikeouts -- numbers that pale in comparison to other young sluggers like Vladimir Guerrero or Lance Berkman. This year, he got off to a slow start, but has hit in six of his last seven games to raise his average from .196 to .250. He has also has six home runs and 14 RBI.

Can Jones still reach superstar status? Or is his career destined to be labeled a disappointment? As Jones turns 25 today (April 23), the writers at Baseball Prospectus discuss:

Rany Jazayerli
Andruw Jones is 25 years old. Think about that for a moment. He's four months older than Marlon Byrd, who's a great prospect even though he hasn't reached the majors yet. Jones has more than 3,000 at-bats, more than 150 homers. He has the best defensive numbers of any outfielder in major-league history, granted that he hasn't gone through a decline phase yet.

His OPS climbed every year from his rookie campaign through 2000. Sure, he had a bad year in 2001. I think he's allowed one of those. He has become a more disciplined hitter with age, although he's still a little too likely to swing at sliders down and away.

To answer the question: I think he has developed the way he was expected to, and if he hasn't, it's only because the expectations were unrealistic. He still has a lot of growth left in him; he's probably a year or two away from having his offensive performance catch up to his defense.

Keith Woolner
Should we expect players who reach major-league caliber at an early age to continue developing at the same rate as a "typical" player? A fair number of them should be early peakers, the flip side of those who peak at 30 or later. It's the difference between Mike Greenwell, who had his best season at a young age, and Dwight Evans, who gradually improved into one of the better hitters in the league. The former is a disappointment because he had the nerve to peak early, whereas the clearest memories of Evans are of a gracefully aging slugger.

Michael Wolverton
It says a lot about the expectations for Jones that a player of his caliber can be labeled a "disappointment" at the major-league level. He's been an All-Star, and he finished in the top 10 in MVP voting just two years ago. In fact, you could make a case that he should have won that MVP award.

Still, while he's been a very good player, there's no denying that he hasn't hit as well as expected. For the five years he's been a regular major leaguer, he's underperformed his BP-projected OPS by an average of 79 points per year. Baseball Prospectus 1997 predicted that Jones would be a better hitter than Alex Rodriguez, and that "Alex vs. Andruw will be the next generation's DiMaggio vs. Williams." A-Rod has held up his part of that prediction; Jones has not.

Why? A lot of the high expectations for Andruw were based on two excellent years in the minors, where he only had 150 at-bats above A ball. I'm no scout, but it doesn't take a scout to see that there are some holes in his approach at the plate: he tries to pull everything in sight, and he's not terribly selective. It serves to reason that a hitter like that would suffer a larger-than-usual dropoff in the majors, where the pitchers are able to exploit those holes a lot better than 19-year-old Carolina Leaguers.

Gary Huckabay
Perhaps the expectations of the baseball world were unreasonable. Jones is just now turning 25, plays in a park that's not a hitters' paradise, and has logged 156 career home runs. He's also one of the best defensive center fielders ever.

The easy way out would be to point to his alleged partying, play that can appear lackadaisical, or take yet another shot at Merv Rettenmund. But the bottom line is that collectively, we really have no idea what the expectations were, nor why Jones may or may not have reached them.

Joe Sheehan
If the expectation is that a player is going to become Ken Griffey Jr., but with Dwayne Murphy's defense, who is really to blame: the player, or the people hyping him? We were as guilty as anyone of overpromoting Jones, based largely on his tremendous 1996. He has been an excellent player, one of the top 15 or 20 in the NL over the past four years, and he's still just 25. If that's being a "disappointment," that says more about us than Jones.

Jones's career path to date isn't entirely unlike that of Sammy Sosa. Sosa took longer to become good, then had a pretty lousy 1997 before becoming Sammy! in 1998. Both players struggled at times with the strike zone, and both are tools gods. I think Jones has that kind of explosive step forward ahead of him, and will render a question like this moot within 12 months.

You can check out more work from the team of writers of the Baseball Prospectus (tm) at their web site at baseballprospectus.com.