In Retrospect, Mike Trout

When does something that's obvious become something that's reasonable?

Lewie Pollis, a former BP colleague turned front office insider turned author of the Lewsletter newsletter, posed this question to me:

In retrospect, what is the timeframe in which it was reasonable for a knowledgeable baseball person to decide that Mike Trout was the best player in baseball? As in, when your reaction to hearing “Mike Trout is the best player in baseball" would have shifted from a scoff and an eyeroll to mere skepticism.

Lew, what’d you have to say “in retrospect” for? If you asked me when I made the switch in my life, that’d be an easy answer: July 15, 2012. But that guy, Me Then, didn’t know anything, he just wanted to believe whatever was the most fun thing to believe. “In retrospect” suggests I should be able to find the right answer, with all the omniscience of a time traveler. When, in fact, this turns out to be a brain-breaking question for me. I kind of have no idea!

“Mike Trout in 2013,” photo by Keith Allison via Wikimedia Commons.

So here’s my jumbled attempt to get to an answer, going step by step through my false starts:

1. Isn’t the obvious answer just to see who projects to be the best at any given moment? Just look at the PECOTAs, guy.
Yes, this is what I would recommend to somebody who wants to know the best player right now. This would be my humble way of acknowledging that the best approach is not to point at the thing I like and say “I like it, I like it!” but to have some consistent, empirically tested process that weights past performance along with factors that might predict future performance, like age and the durability of certain types of skills. And that’s how I would know that, in early 2012, the answer to the question “who is the best player in baseball” was undoubtedly Albert Pujols.

Albert Pujols would end up with the 27^th most WAR in baseball that year, his first season with the Angels. He had less than half of Mike Trout’s WAR and everybody could see that he looked old. He was, obviously, not the best player in baseball, not even close.

But, fine, one might say, he was the best player in baseball up to the start of the 2012 season, but then he stopped being it. Projections can only take us so far, all things must pass, etc. Except that before the 2013 season, he was again PECOTA’s projected best player in baseball, thanks to his long pre-2012 track record. Which means that after a full year of Albert Pujols definitely not being the best player in baseball, the projections method still would have led you to say he was.

When you think about it, projections are just another way of looking at the past. And so, if we’re just looking at the past anyway….

2. Isn’t the only justifiable answer, then, to look at past performance and declare the greatest after the trials have been run? Just look at the WARs, man.
Yes, probably, this is what I would recommend to somebody who wants to know who the best player in baseball last year. This would be my humble way of acknowledging that the best player in baseball at present (let alone the future) is an unknowable thing, and all we can do is describe the past.

But still I can’t answer this, because no one time frame is the definitive one. From 2014 to 2016, Trout led the majors in WAR, by roughly one full MVP season’s worth of WAR. He won two MVP awards and finished second once. This is as uncontroversial as anything you can say about ball: From 2014 to 2016, Mike Trout did more good baseball than any human alive.

But was he the best player in 2015, specifically? In 2015, Bryce Harper arguably had a better year than Trout did. In that three-year span, Harper only had half of Trout’s WAR, but in just the one year Harper topped him. Is one year long enough to reset the rankings? You could do this for individual months, even weeks, if you’re fixated on observing what actually happened. In 2014, Mike Trout passed Troy Tulowitzki in WAR in the fourth month of the season. So who was better in those first three months—Tulo, because he had the better WAR in those three months, or Trout, because those three months are included in the four months?

3. Can’t you just look at like a rolling average or something?
Yes, this is obviously the answer. Say, a three-year average. You don’t look at a player’s performance on one day, or in one week, or just looking back a year, or just looking forward a year, but as the center of a rolling average that gives you a solid sense of his true essence around that time period. You smooth out the peaks and valleys. You don’t have to grant Bryce Harper Best In The World credit over Trout for 2015, because Harper hadn’t done it in 2014 and he wouldn’t do it in 2016, while Trout did and would.

But this method creates nonsensities. This method tells us that Marcus Semien was the best player in baseball in 2020, since he led the majors in WAR from 2019-2021. This would surprise a lot of ball fans but, hey, we all like surprises and Semien really was extraordinary and deserves more credit as an elite player than he gets. The problem is, 2020 was the worst season of his career! He finished third in the majors in WAR in 2019, and tied for second in the majors in WAR in 2021, and in those seasons he was among the very best players in the world. But he was 224^th in the majors in WAR in 2020. This method obviously fails!

It fails Trout, too. In this method, Trout couldn’t be called the greatest player alive in 2012, because he hadn’t done squat in 2011. That’s silly.

4. Should we have a bias toward stability or no?
This is the big question. How many best players in baseball are there in a typical 10-year period—one, two, 10, 20? Is the player of the month the best player alive for a month or did he just have a good month? What’s the shortest possible period a player could be allowed to hold the title—three months, three years, nine years, what? Did Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez go back and forth dozens of times in the 2000s, like lead changes in a basketball game? Or does being best player alive become like an armor, where you don’t lose the title until some other alternative really pounds you? Lewie, I need clearer instructions!

5. So just never believe anything?
No. I’m certain of things. I’m certain that on September 13, 2014 Mike Trout was the greatest baseball player actively walking this planet. On that day, he was the major-league leader in WAR for the season. He had led the majors in WAR the year before, and the year before that, and he entered the year projected to lead the majors in WAR and he started the next year projected to lead the league in WAR. And then over the next three years he would lead the majors in WAR (by a ton). And no matter how much you shrink the timeline down, he’s still the champ: He led the majors in WAR produced that day, hitting two homers and doubling and drawing a walk. He led the majors in WAR produced in the previous week. He was about to be named the MVP, in a unanimous vote. There is zero doubt that, no matter how hard one might have tried to avoid the obvious, Mike Trout had reached a destination reached by somewhere between 15 and maybe 200 players in modern history: Greatest player alive.

6. That’s awfully slow to realize it.
Yes, worthless. The projections would have said it sometime late in the 2013 season, and that’s awfully slow, too, though not nearly as slow as Sept. 13, 2014. Okay, back to what my answer at the time would have been: July 15, 2012. This was the first series of the second half of his rookie season. He went to New York to play the Yankees for the first time. He went 7-for-14, and it was clear that the defense couldn’t defend his speed and his strength at the same time. At that point he was hitting .349/.403/.574, leading the majors in WAR (despite spending most of April in Triple-A), and in the middle of the best month any player had that year. He would homer 10 times that month, steal nine bases in nine tries, hit .392/.455/.804.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” Upton Sinclair supposedly once said. I was strongly incentivized to believe Mike Trout was the best player in baseball that summer. I was following him around the country working on a big cover story for ESPN the Magazine. But I definitely believed it. Reading that story now, I see that I was not cautious at all: I write that “Mike Trout was 20 when he became the best player alive,” i.e. sometime before Aug. 7 of that year. And I say that an early June series against the Rockies that year “might be the series when we say that Mike Trout went from the latest rookie phenom to the best player in baseball.” But I personally remember it happening during the Yankees series. July 15, 2012.

I’d get occasional eye rolls at this kind of talk; a few people I’d interview who would say it was too much, too soon. But, for the most part, everybody I spoke to was in a race to love Mike Trout the most. "I saw him down by the clubhouse,” a scout told me.  “Look, I don't care about having my picture taken. But I wanted to have my picture taken with him. I haven't had my picture taken with somebody since Ted Williams.” That was a knowledgeable baseball person.

I’m glad you asked, Lewie. I actually had forgotten how quickly we all agreed to this fact, that Trout was the best. It was obvious before it was reasonable. Part of why Mike Trout’s career has been such a delight is that we all agreed, way too early, and very loudly, that we believed certain things about him, and then for a decade we were right! We were way ahead of the projections, ahead of any “reasonable” method of coming to this conclusion, and yet, for once in this sport, we weren’t let down.