Our question of the spring was this:

If players were a stock, which hitters would you buy stock in over the next 10 years?

In other words, who will be the perennial All-Stars over the next 10 seasons? And when that 10th season is over, who will we look at and say, "This guy is one of the best players of his time?"

We asked that question of scouts, GMs and players just recently removed from the minor leagues. Some of the answers won't surprise you. A couple might.

For the sake of keeping the debate under control, we made the age cutoff 26 -- so that the 10th season would be played at age 35 or younger.

And now, the envelopes please ...

1. Alex Rodriguez, 26. Do we really need to explain this? A-Rod is only about six months older than Lance Berkman, but he already owns more career homers (251) than Roberto Clemente, more career RBI (730) than Thurman Munson and more career hits (1,167) than Roy Campanella.

2. Adam Dunn, 22. See the accompanying story. Last year, in his three-stop journey from Double-A to Cincinnati, Dunn became the youngest player to hit 50-plus home runs in a season in professional baseball since the mysterious Calvin Felix did it in the late, great Class C Sunset League in 1947.

3. Vladimir Guerrero, 26. Four full seasons, four straight seasons of at least a .300 average, 30 homers, 100 RBI, 100 runs and 80 extra-base hits. Just two other players in history had four .300, 30-homer, 100-RBI seasons before turning 26 -- Joe DiMaggio and Jimmie Foxx.

4. Eric Chavez, 24. The only three third basemen with more homers and RBI than Chavez (58 HR, 200 RBIs) over the last two seasons are Troy Glaus, Chipper Jones and Phil Nevin. Only Glaus still plays third base. And no one west of Scott Rolen plays third any better than Chavez.

5. Pat Burrell, 25. You'll still find Burrell trading on the Futures market, because he hasn't fulfilled the first-pick-in-the-country expectations yet. But the baseball world continues to view him as some kind of cross between Jeff Bagwell and Mark McGwire waiting to happen. When it happens, better roll that videotape.

Also receiving votes
Lance Berkman, Albert Pujols, Alfonso Soriano, Aramis Ramirez, Andruw Jones, Carlos Beltran, Nick Johnson, Troy Glaus.

And had we expanded the age upward a year or two, all of these players would have gotten votes -- some of them many votes: Ichiro Suzuki, Todd Helton, Bobby Abreu, Derek Jeter and Scott Rolen.