Jeff Conine has played in 2,004 regular season major league games, 206th all-time (tied with Cesar Cedeno) and likely to move up into the top 200 before he retires at the end of this season.
Yet by his 27th birthday he had played only 110 games in the majors. So only about 5.5% of his career games played came before he turned 27. Of guys with at least 2,000 career games played, I believe Edgar Martinez is the only player who played a lower percentage of his career games before his 27th birthday --Edgar played in only 92 (or about 4.6%) of his 2,055 games before age 27.
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Cliff Blau, a much-valued, veteran baseball researcher, points out to me that Hall-of-Famer Sam Rice played in only 2.6% of his 2,404 career games before his 27th birthday. A late bloomer indeed. I should have remembered Rice in this context, as Bill James, in his wonderful Historical Abstract includes a discussion of the "late bloomer" phenomenon, and how extremely rare it is among Hall of Fame level players, in the context of his coverage of Sam Rice.
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