The Best Player in Baseball - Mike Trout and his incredible statistics
Mike Trout - The numbers behind the best player in baseball
On the surface, Mike Trout isn’t a flashy player by any measure. He lacks the charisma of a Bryce Harper, the flash of a Javier Baez, the raw power of an Aaron Judge, or the blinding speed of a Trea Turner.
Truth be told, Trout isn’t even considered a major household name in America despite being one of the greatest complete players in the history of America’s favourite pastime.
Is it his lack of playoff experience? Legendary players are often tied to how many championships they win, and Trout has yet to even sniff an opportunity to play in a World Series.
But baseball at its core is a team game, where having the best player doesn’t always guarantee success.
In fact, the essence of baseball is usually beyond the play-by-play, a true analytical game that depends more on probabilities and percentages than proven success and expected outcomes.
It is within these many numbers and statistics, that Trout’s true greatness shines through.
Baseball, more than any other sport, is dominated by statistics. Nearly every single action on the field can be defined by a statistical category or percentage, but the one metric that many in the baseball world use to calculate the greatness of a player is WAR.
WAR or Wins Above Replacement is a sum of statistics that calculates a player’s contributions to his team.
It is not a tangible concept like total home runs or batting average which can be simple to understand.
Instead, WAR has taken on its own world where baseball intellectuals can actually come to a calculation on how valuable a player is in that particular situation.
The bottom line is that WAR finds us how many more wins the team would have had with this particular player rather than any old replacement player.
After the 2019 season, Trout was already 87th in all time WAR. Yes, 87th.
There have been by some estimates about 20,000 players that have ever suited up for a Major League Baseball game and at age 28 in his 9th MLB season, Trout already has a greater WAR than 99% of players that have ever played.
That number gets even more impressive when we see that out of position players he is 56th all-time. On its own, the number is truly staggering and difficult to even comprehend.
How can Trout be so valuable to a team that never really wins?
Until this season, the Angels have never really been aggressive in free agency or trades, and have never put a team around Trout that had a chance at winning a World Series.
They have been as mundane and average a franchise as there can be. They watched as their division rival Houston Astros broke down and rebuilt their team to win a World Series (albeit now with the asterisk of a tainted win).
Still, WAR is intangible and while it is a calculation, it is not one that really shows up on the field.
It is a statistic that takes everything that has already happened into account to place a certain value on a player for what their future expectations are. WAR can be difficult to understand and even more impossible to imagine as an impact on the actual diamond.
There is more. Nine years into his professional career we can see that Trout has already won the Rookie of the Year, three AL MVP awards, and four AL MVP runner ups. He has been either the MVP or the runner up in seven of his nine seasons (and really his first season was only 40 games as a rookie).
Trout has been named to the All Star game every single full season he has been in the league, and has won seven Silver Slugger Awards as the best offensive player at his position.
If those awards are not enough, then consider this. Trout has led the league in ten different offensive categories over the course of his career.
Yes, in nine seasons he has led the league in ten offensive categories for an entire season.
He has led the league in
runs scored in four different seasons,
total walks in three different seasons,
OBP (Onbase percentage which is calculated by hits plus walks plus hit by a pitch, essentially how often a player gets on base at an at bat) in four different seasons,
OPS + (again, another statistic that basically takes a player’s OBP plus slugging percentage and adjusts it for the parks they play in) in a staggering six different seasons,
OPS (OBP plus slugging percentage) in four different seasons,
slugging percentage in three different seasons,
intentional walks in three different seasons, and
total bases, stolen bases, and runs batted in (RBI) in one season each.
What may be even more impressive is that Trout led the MLB in five of those categories last season en route to his third AL MVP award, a sign that at age 28, Trout is refusing to slow down.
Only 37 other players in the history of the MLB have led the league in as many categories as Trout has and only three of those players have played in the same era of expansion as Trout where there have been more teams, and therefore more players, than at any other point in time in history.
That is a lot of stats to bite off and chew, but perhaps this single statement sums it up best about Mike Trout: entering only his tenth MLB season, Trout is already a hall of famer without having to accomplish anything else in his career.
Not a ‘no doubt hall of famer’ or a ‘shoe in’, Trout is quite literally as valuable in his first ten seasons as most hall of famers were in their entire careers.
Mike Trout : He’s pretty good on defence too.
This was probably true a year or two ago as well, but the 2019 season when he captured his third AL MVP may have clinched a reservation in the inner circle of players that are the greatest of all time.
Whenever the 2020 MLB season gets under way this year, Trout will have quite possibly the strongest team around him he has ever had. Top free agent signing Anthony Rendon and a healthy Shohei Ohtani means that Trout no longer has to carry this team on his own.
A World Series ring would be nice but no matter how you look at it, by the time Trout hangs up his cleats to await his entry into the hall of fame, he could be the greatest player to ever play the game by any measurement.
