I started blogging about the Mariners almost the instant they stopped being good. I went forward with that for some reason on a daily basis for something like a decade, and there was a whole lot of losing involved. As such, there are a lot of low points to pick from, and I don’t know when I experienced rock bottom, but I know when I felt particularly low. I can vividly recall a moment when something seemed to snap. The whole 2010 season was unfathomably bad, and it was a race to the finish line. September might as well have not existed, but it did exist, and toward the end of it, the Mariners played the Rangers, and the Rangers scored the winning run on a strikeout.

Fans of bad teams often say it’s as if their team finds new ways to lose. For me, that actually *was* a new way to lose. I’d never seen it. Many people had never seen anything like it. See, it’s extremely uncommon. And why wouldn’t it be? A strikeout is an out. A walk-off strikeout shouldn’t exist. But there’s room there for an opportunity; the door is cracked ever so slightly open. The Rangers won on a walk-off strikeout. And last night, the Angels did the same thing.

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About a month ago, the Angels lost Mike Trout to injury. He’s still a few weeks away from returning. Trout’s absence was supposed to be crippling, and indeed, it probably should’ve been crippling. But one of the best active fun facts around is that, since Trout was sidelined, the Angels have played better. Now, that isn’t something I suggest you over-interpret. It doesn’t mean anything much. It doesn’t mean Trout isn’t the most valuable player in the world. It’s just a random curiosity. And, good for the Angels! What they’ve pulled off has been deeply impressive.

At this point, the Angels are very much a wild-card contender. Trout’s coming back soon. So there’s reason to look up and down the roster in an attempt to identify areas for improvement. There are still various areas of concern, but one’s eyes are drawn to Albert Pujols. Pujols, right now, has a 2017 WAR of -1.0. That’s tied for the second-lowest mark in the game. Pujols, through that lens, has been a major problem, and few of his regular numbers are any good. However, the Angels themselves have pushed back. They’ve publicly disagreed with the idea that Pujols hasn’t been useful.

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Jacob Scavuzzo, OF, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
Level: Double-A  Age: 23   Org Rank: HM   Top 100: NR
Line: 3-for-5, 3 HR
Notes
Scavuzzo has above-average raw power, but he often expands the zone; has a stubborn, pull-only approach to contact; and has long levers. That’s a potent swing-and-miss cocktail, but hitters with Scavuzzo’s body type sometimes put it together a bit later than their peers. He’s 23.

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Young players are fun, because young players are fresh. They give us something new to think about, keeping baseball just spicy enough to ward off too much boredom. Every young player comes with some form of strength, and it’s entertaining for a while. In time, we get used to it. Then there are new young players.

When Andrelton Simmons was younger, he was all over the internet. His strength was that he played like one of the best defensive shortstops in baseball history, and that made an immediate impression. It felt for a while like, every other day, there was a new Simmons clip that people would fawn over. And, justifiably so — Simmons was doing things other people couldn’t do. But, ultimately, humans are humans, and Simmons stopped feeling so exciting. We came to expect the defense. The bat didn’t develop. New players came around. Simmons turned just 27 last September, but he was all but absent from the conversation about the new wave of shortstops.

And, hell, that makes some since, given that by now Simmons counts as a veteran. This is his sixth year playing in the major leagues. I mentioned, though, that he’s only 27. Simmons is making himself relevant again. He’s showing off a new trick, one we waited for for years.

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The Angels outlasted the Yankees Tuesday night, walking off 3-2 in the bottom of the 11th. As a result, the Angels moved to 34-34, a record which is the very definition of neither good nor bad. Some people would argue that playing .500 baseball is actually the worst possible path, but the Angels should be counting their blessings. They’re within easy striking distance of a wild-card spot, and, oh, by the way, they’ve won more games than they’ve lost since losing Mike Trout.

It doesn’t hurt that Eric Young has *played like* Mike Trout. That’s just one of those things. There is no explanation. But let’s think about where the Angels are. Before the year, I thought the Angels’ chances of success would come down to Garrett Richards, Matt Shoemaker, and Tyler Skaggs. They were projected for a combined 8.1 WAR. They’ve actually combined for a total of 1.0. So, that’s a bad look, and the rotation has had its predictable problems. What’s really astonishing to me, though, is the bullpen. Like the rotation, the bullpen has been made worse by injury. Unlike the rotation, the bullpen has still found a way.

This isn’t how this was supposed to go. The bullpen was supposed to be the liability, even when intact. A patchwork assortment of journeymen has helped to keep the Angels afloat.

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It was just last week that we were extolling the virtues of Mike Trout. How quickly things can change. How quickly the hammer of fate can smite those who dare tempt it. How quickly things can go so very wrong.

When Trout stole second base in the fifth inning on Sunday, he came up wagging his hand and in pain. He eventually left the game, and we now know that he tore a ligament in his thumb when he accidentally jammed his hand into the bag while sliding. Trout’s elected to have surgery to repair the ligament and has a six- to eight-week timetable to return.

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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It’s that time again, when we provide your somewhat regularly scheduled update on the exploits of Mike Trout. When we last saw our protagonist, he was rocking a 210 wRC+ on April 24th. That was good enough for sixth best in baseball, but given that it was April 24th, we were sure to see some regression. Right?

Now it’s May 24th, and Mike Trout has a 220 wRC+. That’s the best in baseball. It means he’s been 120% better on offense than the league average. He’s twice the average offensive player and then some. Since he’s often considered to be a reincarnation of Mickey Mantle, it should be noted that Mantle never had a single season wRC+ that high, his best mark being a 217 in 1957. He was worth 11.4 WAR in 144 games.

Speaking of WAR, Trout’s accumulated a 3.3 mark so far this year. That naturally also leads the league by a fair margin and has taken Trout over the 50-win mark for his career. In doing so, he’s passed a number of all-time greats in total career value. Those players include Luis Aparicio, Orlando Cepeda, Fred Lynn, David Ortiz, and Jimmy Rollins. He’s very close to passing George Sisler and Enos Slaughter. He’s still got a few months until he turns 26.

Of course, it’s not surprising to see Trout playing this well. It’s not surprising that this past Monday’s game was only the seventh 0-for he’s taken over the first 42 games he’s played this year. (He still managed to walk twice.) It’s not shocking to see Trout playing out of his mind like this, or to know that the above homer from yesterday tied him for the big league lead in homers with Aaron Judge.

And that’s because he’s Mike Trout, the guy who’s already punched his ticket as one of the best players to ever play the game. He’s the guy who’s finished first or second in MVP voting in every full season he’s played, and arguably should have won every time. He’s been the most consistently great player in the game since the second he was called up in 2012. He’s among that extremely small percentage of players who shouldn’t be discounted from being able to carry a 200 (or larger) wRC+ for a whole season, because he’s simply that talented. And by typical player aging curves, Trout hasn’t even hit his prime yet.

Trout, as good as he’s been, has never finished a season having outpaced the league by this much. It’s important to note that it is, indeed, just May 24th, but Trout’s hitting profile looks pretty similar to what he’s produced in the past. He’s just simply hitting the ball with even more power. His walk and strikeout rates are generally the same as last year, and he’s basically taken just two percentage points of ground-ball rate and put them into fly-ball rate. The only marked difference is that his soft contact rate is somehow up to 20% from 12%.

Ben Lindbergh recently noted in an excellent piece of work at The Ringer that Trout is swinging more than ever, and that he’s swinging more often at meatballs in the middle. Swinging more often can sometimes be dangerous, but Trout is pulling it off with aplomb, as Ben noted.

In his first, brief exposure to the big leagues, Trout’s selective aggression ranked in the first percentile compared with qualifying hitters. He swung at fewer than half of the pitches he saw in the strike zone and almost a third of likely balls, showing relatively little ability to differentiate between pitches he could punish and pitches even he would have a hard time driving. His ratio improved in 2012 and again in 2013 and 2014 before regressing in 2015, when he was probably playing through a wrist issue. Last year and this year, his strike zone judgment has made further strides, to the point that he’s now in the 94th percentile — one of the game’s smartest swingers

Having a strong feel for the strike zone isn’t the only ingredient of offensive success: Plenty of hitters have the ability to distinguish balls from strikes but lack the coordination and power to make the most of that skill. But when a hitter with Trout’s physical gifts adds elite discipline to the mix, pitchers can’t counter. Thus far, they’ve thrown fewer pitches in the strike zone to Trout than ever before, but he’s not biting on bad pitches. Over the course of his career, Trout has produced a .465 weighted on-base average when swinging at pitches inside the strike zone and a .250 wOBA when swinging at pitches outside the strike zone. It makes perfect sense that he’d be even more potent now that he’s swinging at the former pitches more often and the latter less often.

Ben also pointed out that Trout is pouncing on first-pitch curves more than ever, which counters a previously popular method of attack against him. Trout is plugging the few tiny holes in his game, and it’s resulting in some dazzling production.

There’s probably going to be a bit of regression from the phenomenal offensive high he’s currently riding, but there isn’t reason to expect a ton of it. We’ve always wondered about the hypothetical of whether or not Trout has peaked yet, of whether or not there’s still room between his current state and the upper limit of his possible performance. That may be what we’re looking at right now. If Trout is reaching his physical peak, maybe that explains his .411 ISO, which is well above that even of the behemoth Judge.

Nothing should be surprising with Trout, except if perhaps if he took the mound and started striking people out. As I noted over the winter, he’s basically already a Hall of Famer. He’s just gotten even better now. Trout could very well come back down to his heightened version of reality at some point in the near or distant future, because it’s extremely hard to hit this well for an entire season. There have only been 32 instances of a qualified batter carrying a wRC+ of 200 or greater for a season. Many of those campaigns were had by men named Ruth, Bonds, and Williams. That’s how good Trout has been, and what kind of company he would have to keep to do this from now until October.

We shouldn’t put it past him. We shouldn’t expect him to do it, either, but we shouldn’t immediately discount it. Trout is a special player, and possibly the greatest to ever play the game. He’s the one thing keeping the Angels from being basement-dwellers.

He’s absolutely, incredibly, ridiculously great. We’re lucky to be able to watch him perform.

It’s not uncommon for a pitcher to experience difficulty as a starter, move to the bullpen, and benefit from almost immediate success. That’s a story we’ve heard plenty. We’re seeing it in Arizona right now, for example — with both Archie Bradley and Jorge de la Rosa — but they’re hardly the only cases. Bullpens are littered with failed starters. The best relief pitcher ever began his major-league career with a collection of uninspiring starts.

In Anaheim, though, we might possibly be witnessing a more rare type of story. Right-hander JC Ramirez is working as a a starter right now — for the first time since Double-A in 2011, actually — and, well, there are plenty of reasons to think he’ll be a good at it. Dude’s posting the best strikeout rate of his career, and it makes sense when you look under the hood.

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If you sort the wRC+ leaderboard, you find Mike Trout sandwiched in between Eugenio Suarez and Steven Souza Jr. That’s the bad way to spin it. The good way to spin it is that Trout is in sixth with a wRC+ of 210, and that would also easily be the best mark of his career. I don’t have any good reason to write this right now, except that it’s Mike Trout, so, hey, why not? Does Trout have anything going on underneath the surface?

As always, sure. Here’s a home run from last Friday:

As Daren Willman pointed out on Twitter, that’s the most-outside pitch Trout has ever taken deep. This is a plot of his career home runs:

This is the location of that very pitch:

There’s more in here. One thing you might notice is that that’s a first-pitch home run. Trout has gradually been getting more aggressive. He used to swing at the first pitch about 10% of the time. Last year, he jumped to 17%, and so far this year, he’s at 26%. Just in terms of overall swing rate, Trout right now is at 45%, which would be a career high, easily. He has his highest-ever swing rate at would-be strikes, and his chase rate is the highest it’s been since he first came up in 2011. Trout isn’t an aggressive hitter, but he’s looking like a more aggressive hitter, by Mike Trout standards. Something to watch over the coming weeks and months.

Continuing on, that pitch there also would’ve been a ball. Trout swung, and hit it, and hit it hard. This is presumably just a weird statistical fluke, but Trout’s in-zone contact rate is just under 83%, and his out-of-zone contact rate is just over 81%. The two rates are separated by about one percentage point. His career separation is 18 percentage points. Trout’s been hitting a lot of would-be balls. That doesn’t seem good, but, again, 210 wRC+. Nothing to complain about here. Just an observation.

And, at last, that first-pitch homer went to right-center field. Trout’s been less about pulling the ball in 2017. I calculated the difference between pull rate and opposite-field rate. Last season, among qualified hitters, Trout ranked in the 44th percentile. This season, he ranks in the 14th percentile. It’s quite exaggerated when you look at Trout’s ground balls, alone — in terms of pulling grounders, last year, Trout ranked in the 91st percentile. So far this year, he ranks in the 7th percentile. The 7th! Pulled ground balls are basically death. Trout hasn’t been pulling so many of them, and he’s still ultra-dangerous when the ball is batted back. His approach for the first few weeks has focused on using the whole field, and although everything is always cyclical, this is at the very least a helpful reminder that Mike Trout can be successful in countless different ways.

So, early Trout: more aggressive, with more contact out of the zone, and more balls hit the other way. His numbers are fantastic. That last part — that’s the part that doesn’t change.