Mike Trout has been baseball's consensus best player for a long time now. That was reflected this week in the unveiling of our annual MLB Rank Top 100, which once again placed Trout at the top of the heap.
This is the sixth straight year in which Trout has topped our rankings, stretching back to when it was known as the BBTN 100. Trout began his rise in 2013, on the heels of his historic 2012 rookie season, finishing third, with Miguel Cabrera topping the list. By 2014, the throne was Trout's alone. It has remained so ever since, even as the names around him shift from year to year.
Here are the top five from each year of Trout's six-year reign:
The results from our panel of voters line up nicely with my own view on the topic. There are single seasons in which a player might surpass Trout statistically, such as Mookie Betts' 2018 campaign. Betts, in my view, had the best season of any player in 2018. Yet that does not mean Betts has become the game's best player. Not yet. It takes more than one season to overtake a player who is as consistently elite as Trout.
As we approach the 2019 season, is there any chance that anyone can catch Trout? How would we know? What would that look like?
In the outfield installment of the Position Tiers series, I laid out a framework for identifying the "best in the game" at any point in big league history, using five-year averages for win shares as the basis.
By that measure, Trout has been baseball's best since 2014, aligning with the conclusions of ESPN voters over the past few years. That five-year reign puts Trout in an exclusive club. Others who have held the top spot for five years or more in a row: Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Joe Morgan, Mike Schmidt, Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols.
Now, keep in mind that the five-year score looks at the two years before and the two years after a measured season. The goal is to estimate the true talent level of the player at a given point in time. Doing it that way means that when it comes to the numbers through 2018, we're talking about the average for only the 2016 to 2018 seasons -- there are no "two years after" to be measured.
Here is how the numbers stack up for active players through the end of last season:
Win shares leaders, 2016 to 2018
1. Mike Trout, Angels (104.9)
2. Jose Altuve, Astros (95.4)
3. Mookie Betts, Red Sox (91.4)
4. Joey Votto, Reds (81.5)
5. Charlie Blackmon, Rockies (80.91)
6. Francisco Lindor, Indians (80.92)
7. Jose Ramirez, Indians (79.9)
8. Paul Goldschmidt, Cardinals (79.6)
9. Christian Yelich, Brewers (79.1)
10. Freddie Freeman, Braves (78.3)
This is just one approach, using a certain set of numbers, but whatever approach and whatever metrics you want to use, I doubt you'd come to a different conclusion. Trout is baseball's top player, over X number of years, and there is no one else at the moment who is particularly close. Is it even within the realm of possibility that someone could alter that consensus with an enormous 2019 season?
For someone to catch Trout in an end-of-season measurement, let's consider what the numbers would need to look like, using the four-year span of 2016 to 2019. It's a pretty clear picture: The closest player to Trout -- Altuve -- would have to erase that gap of 9.5 win shares, and anybody further back would have to overcome an even bigger deficit.
The first thing that would need to happen is that Trout would have to have a bad year. A terrible year, really. And other than his rocky partial season when he first broke in during the 2011 season, Trout just doesn't do bad seasons. He only does great. According to Baseball-Reference.com, Trout has led the American League in offensive wins above replacement in every season since 2012 other than 2017, when he played only 114 games because of injury. That year, he was second.
If Trout were to have a lost year because of injury, that would certainly hurt his standing in metrics like WAR and win shares, which have cumulative aspects to them. I'm not sure it would necessarily change the consensus that he's the game's best, however. For that to happen, Trout would need to play most of the season and actually not perform well.
This would be arguably the most inexplicable development in baseball history, but let's say Trout goes full Chris Davis in 2019. Davis, the once-fearsome slugger for the Orioles who has hit as many as 53 homers in a season, has fallen into a stunning rut the past two seasons. His .168 batting average over 522 plate appearances in 2018 was the lowest qualifying mark in 109 years. That performance translated to just 1.3 win shares, according to TheBaseballGauge.com -- all for his glovework. His offense was a big, fat cipher.
It won't happen. It couldn't possibly happen. But let's say it did. Trout somehow goes out, plays more or less a full season and face-plants to the tune of 1.3 win shares. That would mean that Altuve would need to record just 10.9 win shares to overtake Trout, and he likely would. So too would the others in the top 10, if they replicated or surpassed their 2018 performance. I present this scenario just to illustrate the outer edge of possibility.
More realistically, let's consider Trout's average season over the past five years, which is 37.7 win shares. If he's healthy, or at least playing most every day, a collapse season would be represented by something like a 20 percent drop. Certainly others have declined more from one season to the next, but we're trying to keep things semi-realistic, and Trout has been so damn consistent. So at 80 percent of his recent standard, Trout would put up 30.1 win shares, giving him a four-year total of 135.
Let's say that our nine Trout pursuers would need to gain a win-share edge of 3, because if they nose ahead by decimal points, Trout might well retain his standing. (Realistically, he might anyway, no matter what happens in 2019.) That would mean the player would have to end the 2019 campaign with a four-year win shares total of at least 138. Here are the totals each of the next nine would need to reach to get to 138:
2019 win shares needed to pass Trout
Jose Altuve, Astros (42.6)
Mookie Betts, Red Sox (46.6)
Joey Votto, Reds (56.5)
Charlie Blackmon, Rockies (57.1)
Francisco Lindor, Indians (57.1)
Jose Ramirez, Indians (58.2)
Paul Goldschmidt, Cardinals (58.5)
Christian Yelich, Brewers (59.0)
Freddie Freeman, Braves (59.7)
Those numbers look big, and they are, but let's consider them in context. The highest win shares total of the modern era is 56.7, a mark set by Pirates Hall of Famer Honus Wagner in 1908. So unless anyone on the above list from Votto down is poised for the best season in big league history, he ain't catching Trout.
That leaves the top two: Altuve and Betts.
Betts' target (46.6 win shares) is a total that has been reached just 19 times in baseball history. The last to do it was Barry Bonds in 2004. The others to reach that level for even one season are Wagner, Babe Ruth, Jack Chesbro, Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Walter Johnson, Mickey Mantle, Bonds and Rogers Hornsby. Other than Chesbro, whose record 41-win season in 1904 was a bit of a fluke, these are all upper-tier, all-time-elite names.
The thing is, if I woke from a coma a year from now and you told me that Betts had emerged as an all-time great, I'd be inclined to believe you. Still, Betts' MVP 2018 season netted "only" 38.8 win shares, up from 28.4 the season before. Does Betts have another 8 or so win shares in him?
Well, consider what a 46.6-win-shares season looks like. Nobody has hit that exact decimal point before, but Willie Mays reached 46.5 in 1965. Betts has been compared to Mays because of his all-around prowess as a great hitter, baserunner and top-of-the-game defender, so that makes this a worthwhile task. Mays' numbers in 1965: .317/.398/.645, 52 homers, 112 RBIs, 118 runs, 9 steals and a Gold Glove. All that production was compiled in a pitching-dominant season.
Using the conversion tool at Baseball-Reference.com, Mays' 1965 season, translated to 2018 Fenway Park, looks like this: .323/.404/.656, 53 homers, 116 RBIs, 122 runs, 9 steals. That homer total might be tough for Betts to reach, but then again, he's awfully good and entering his age-26 season.
As for Altuve, on one hand, he's got the easier task. He needs 42.6 win shares -- again, that's given a Trout version of a bad season -- and that's a total that's been reached 48 times. No active player has done it, though Trout reached 42.1 in 2015. Altuve's career-best total is 36.2, his mark from his AL MVP season of 2017. Altuve will be entering his age-29 season, so does he conceivably have another 6 win shares in him?
Not many second basemen have hit 42.6. Nap Lajoie did it. Joe Morgan did too, in 1975. No one from Altuve's list of comparables at Baseball-Reference.com has had a season like that. Morgan doesn't work as a comp because he walked so much more than Altuve, while Lajoie's game was a relic of a bygone era -- converting his 1910 season to 2018 Minute Maid Park yields a .395 batting average and four homers. That's not Altuve. That's not anyone.
The bottom line should be crystalline to you by now. Mike Trout is the best player in baseball and you have to get into Philip K. Dick territory to conceive of a circumstance in which that statement becomes untrue based on 2019 results. That said, even though Altuve is closer to Trout in a multiseason glimpse than Betts, the epic kind of season required to catch Trout would seem more likely for Betts than Houston's keystone star.
This underscores just how amazing Trout is at his craft. For him to be measured at anything other than tops in the sport, he would have to have a far worse season than he ever has before, and that would have to be combined with a season for the ages from another established elite player. That's how much of a gap Trout has built up between himself and every other player in the majors.
In other words, when we do our grand unveiling of MLB Rank 2020, don't get your hopes up for any drama. No one is likely to catch Mike Trout any time soon.
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