Acuña, Harper and Soto are the company Jackson Chourio will be joining. Can he match their success?

A group of five players may have given Milwaukee Brewers fans some trepidation about the record-setting deal Jackson Chourio has agreed to with the team.

Jon Singleton. Scott Kingery. Eloy Jiménez. Evan White. Luis Robert Jr.

Those were the only five players to sign guaranteed long-term contracts before ever appearing in a major-league game before Chourio agreed to a record-setting eight-year, $82-million deal with Milwaukee, which is expected to be officially announced Monday at the winter meetings in Nasvhille.

The deal was finalized over the weekend, with Chourio undergoing physicals Friday and Saturday. The Brewers figure to make it official Monday at the winter meetings in Nashville.

While Robert has worked out well for the Chicago White Sox, the other four players’ performances have all, to varying degrees, been disappointments.

But rather than looking at Chourio through the lens of players who were in a similar contract situation as him, might it be better to glance at his peers age-wise in the recent past?

Because only the most talented of top prospects get called up before they can legally drink — and the sample is greater than just five players — it’s a more effective way to gauge what expectations should be for Chourio rather than looking at contracts.

Here is some encouraging company for Chourio

If the names listed above give you pause about the contract the Brewers are handing Chourio, these names might help alleviate some of that concern.

Álex Rodriguez, Andruw Jones, José Reyes, Miguel Cabrera, Justin Upton, Jason Heyward, Giancarlo Stanton, Mike Trout, Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, Carlos Correa, Rafael Devers, Ronald Acuña Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Fernando Tatis Jr. and Juan Soto.

Those stars were among the 35 players since 1995 to have at least 100 plate appearances during or before their age-20 season. Chourio, who will turn 20 in March, is expected to make it 36.

Among those 35, there are 119 combined all-star appearances. Only eight players from the group haven’t (or haven’t yet if they’re still playing) appeared in an all-star game, while 24 made multiple trips to the midsummer classic.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean Chourio will join that group; there are some busts in that group of 35 – anyone remember Fernando Martinez? – even if the number of all-star caliber players far outnumbers those who came up short.

What it does mean is this: You have to be really advanced as a prospect to work through the minor leagues and make it to the majors that young.

And, most of the time, if a player is that good at that age, he will still be good five or 10 years down the road in the majors – and that's precisely what the Brewers are betting on.

What to expect from a 20-year-old in MLB

Of those 35 players with at least 100 plate appearances in the majors age 20 or younger since 1995, the average slash line is .273/.337/.440 (batting average, OBP, slugging). That’s good for an OPS of .773, which would land right around league average in most years.

Some great players didn’t perform at that level as rookies – Rodriguez, Machado, Trout and Jones among them – which just goes to show that development isn’t linear in this game. Players who reach the majors at that age are outliers from a talent standpoint, and outliers more often than not figure it out.

Teams have become adept at identifying which young players deserve call-ups

Not only have many players in Chourio’s shoes gone on to have excellent big-league careers, but their rookie campaigns are more often than not solid, as well.

The further back in MLB history you go, the more you will find players who debuted young but never went on to do anything in the league. That has changed drastically. The volume of baby-faced callups has diminished while the quality has jumped.

In the last decade or so, teams have gotten very good at knowing when and which young players to call up, as evidenced by the impact many of them have from the jump.

Check out some of these rookie stat lines for 19- and 20-year-olds – and this is only since 2010.

Overall, only four of the last 22 players as young as Chourio to log 100 plate appearances in a season had an OPS under .700, and one of them was Mike Trout.

Will Chourio ascend to this level?

Of course, we don’t know the answer to that right now; there's no guarantee Chourio becomes an all-star.

There are certainly elements of his game in which he has to improve. Early on in his time at Class AA, Chourio struggled against sliders low and away from righties. He can get into pull-happy patterns with his swing and roll over pitches he should be shooting the opposite way with authority.

That said, there are ample reasons to buy into Chourio making it work.

The tools, particularly the power and the speed, are electric. You can’t teach that kind of bat speed, and he taps into his power in game settings because of it. Just as important, his swing decisions have improved from when he was an 18-year-old at Class A and there are now fewer questions about his hit tool than there were a year ago. Chourio is an outlier from a talent standpoint in every sense of the word.

You never know how a young player will respond after receiving life-changing money, but the Brewers, for what it’s worth, have commented positively about Chourio’s off-field makeup and wouldn’t be giving a almost 20-year-old this kind of deal before ever playing in the majors if they weren’t confident in his ability to keep his head on his shoulders.

There will no doubt be struggles for Chourio, especially early on in his big-league career, but the belief in baseball is that you bet on players with flashy tools.

And Chourio has a workshop full of them.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: What to expect from Jackson Chourio with the Brewers