Watching all-time great baseball players age is both a frustrating and fascinating experience. Albert Pujols will never be able to recapture the dominance that gave him one of the greatest first decades in MLB history, as the aging process is unkind and irreversible. Even Barry Bonds with his late-career surge into the record books was a much different player than he was earlier in his career. Albert Pujols has seen something of a revival in 2015, hitting his American League-leading 21st home run of the season on Sunday. The 35-year old Pujols will never be able to get back to the form he had a decade ago, but he is hitting better than he has at any time in an Angels uniform.

With 10 home runs in June, Pujols already has his first double-digit home-run month since August 2010, when he hit 11 homers. His 149 wRC+ is higher than his final season in St. Louis, although the season did not begin as Pujols would have liked. After going 0-for-4 with a strikeout against the Rangers on April 24, Pujols was hitting just .177/.261/.355 in 69 plate appearances. In the 210 plate appearances since, Pujols has been on a tear, hitting .301/.352/.622 with a 173 wRC+ providing Mike Trout a worthy partner in an otherwise punchless Angels’ offense.

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I’ve had something of an obsession. I feel like it’s an understandable one, but that’s the way everyone feels about his/her own obsessions, so let me explain a little bit. Mike Trout’s the best player in baseball, right? I mean, even if you don’t think he’s No. 1, he’s one of the top two or four or five. And he’s probably been No. 1. He’s done silly things to our WAR statistic. Trout makes people think about Mickey Mantle, and not in a way where it’s like, “Mike Trout is good, but he’s no Mickey Mantle.” He might really be the new Mickey Mantle. He’s great. OK. You know that.

Trout’s been amazing, but last year it became apparent he had a weakness. It became increasingly apparent to everyone, and it was ultimately exploited in the playoffs by the Royals. On the off chance you don’t remember what I’m talking about, Trout was incredibly vulnerable against high fastballs, and particularly high, inside fastballs. There was no mystery. Teams would face the best player in baseball, and they knew what they had to do to get him out.

Not that they were able to consistently pull it off. But my obsession was tracking how opponents were pitching to Trout because there was so much to gain from attacking his weakness. He was like an otherwise unbeatable video-game boss with a flashing red rectangle under the chin where he could be felled were he struck just so. Every team had the report, and as more time passed, Trout saw more elevated, inside fastballs. It seemed like something would eventually have to give. Either Trout would make an adjustment, or the major leagues would defeat him and knock him from his perch.

Over the winter, Trout talked from time to time about the hole in his swing. His typical line was that he’d just have to lay off the high-and-tight fastballs, because he said they were usually out of the zone. In reality, a lot of them were in the zone, so Trout’s response was incomplete. He had to know the pitches he’d be seeing, so he had to try to get himself ready for those. And, sure enough, in the early going of the 2015 season, Trout was a high-inside-fastball magnet. Teams hadn’t forgotten what they’d learned the previous summer.

But there’s a funny thing about the best players in baseball. They know how to adjust, especially when they’re young. During the offseason, Trout had a goal. And it became pretty clear early that Trout had fixed his weakness. Gone was the vulnerability. Trout improved his contact against those high, inside fastballs, and he improved his ability to hit them hard. There were loud hits and loud outs. All of them warnings. Trout had adjusted to the adjustment. Which meant it was up to the pitchers again to make an adjustment. How, now, would they work with the league MVP?

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Hitting and pitching may seem equally complicated, but consider this: when it comes to hitting, you have to use both of your hands in one place. By necessity, that adds a wrinkle, and can make hitting analysis difficult. In order to focus on something we can bite off and digest, let’s just ask Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Joc Pederson what they think about the top hand.

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For a while there we thought the Bryce Harper vs. Mike Trout thing was done with. Trout had dusted him. Trout had dusted everyone. Is there anyone Trout hasn’t dusted? Look at yourself! You are covered in dust!

Three straight MVP-quality seasons have made Trout more than a competitor with Harper, they’ve made him the face of baseball (sorry, Eric Sogard!). Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Harper has trudged along at a good, if not great, level. Sure, he’s only 22 and playing in the majors when most of his peers are at Double-A, but at this point comparing him to the best player in baseball is just silliness. That competition is over. Or was over, it seemed, until two weeks ago.

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We’ve had fun, but this might be the last post I ever write about opposing pitchers trying to work Mike Trout upstairs with good heat. It’s not that I’m tired of it. I didn’t think I could ever grow tired of it. For me, it might’ve been the most interesting single thing in baseball, the game’s greatest player having such an obvious vulnerability. How often do we really get to talk about that kind of stuff? No, I’m not saying this because I’m tired of the subject. I’m saying this because it might not be a subject anymore.

I can’t imagine you need background. Everyone knows what was going on. Everyone saw what the Royals did to Mike Trout in last year’s ALDS. Trout’s strikeouts went up because teams realized they could throw him fastballs upstairs. OK, this, we’re all familiar with. It was probably unrealistic to expect Trout to make an adjustment last year on the fly. He’d need an offseason to work out how he wanted to respond. I think we’ve now seen his response. That glaring, obvious weakness? It’s completely disappeared.

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Mike Trout’s exploits are well known, but no matter how well Mike Trout plays, his team will not succeed without productive play from others in the lineup. Mike Trout is not the first great player with a less than stellar supporting cast. It is something he has gone through already in his brief career. In 2012 and 2014, the Angels had solid teams surrounding Trout that won nearly 90 games in 2012 and won the division in 2014, but in 2013, the rest of the Angels provided poor production and the team wasted a 10-win season. The Angels have gotten off to a slow start at 12-15 and they are certainly far from out of the race at this point, but based on the start of the season and the projections from here on out, the Angels could have trouble providing Trout with support and staying in the playoff hunt as the year goes on.

On offense this season, Mike Trout has been 11.6 runs above average, good for sixth in all of baseball while the rest of the position players have been 26.6 runs below average. Even with Mike Trout, the team has an 85 wRC+ in the early going, ranking 25th in Major League Baseball. Mike Trout is hitting .302/.404/.552. while the rest of the team is .218/.275/.323. Garrett Richards, C.J. Wilson, and Matt Shoemaker should perform well in the rotation, but the team projects to finish the season around .500. No matter how hard he tries, Mike Trout cannot end every game like this:
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It’s not just a spring-training blip anymore. For one or two games, you can dismiss a pitcher working with reduced velocity. Sometimes mechanics can be slightly off. Sometimes a pitcher can just be under the weather. Jered Weaver’s gone beyond that. His velocity was way down in spring training, and it’s carried over into each of his regular-season starts. Weaver is down a full three ticks, and that’s a dramatic decline between years. Unsurprisingly, he’s been bad — he’s struck out just one of every 10 hitters. One season ago, his rate was twice as high.

Between years, for starting pitchers, the biggest fastball velocity drop belongs to Derek Holland, and he’s on the disabled list. The second-biggest drop belongs to Henderson Alvarez, and he’s on the disabled list. The fourth-biggest drop belongs to Homer Bailey, and he’s on the disabled list. Weaver owns the third-biggest drop, and he says he feels fine. Which means there’s either something wrong that doesn’t hurt, or this is just what he is. This isn’t what he wants to be.

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By framing runs above average on StatCorner, Chris Iannetta was 54th of 78 catchers that caught at least 1000 pitches last year. This year, he’s first. All it took was a little studying. After reading up, a little twist of the butt and a new relaxation technique was enough to change the fortunes of a 32-year-old backstop.

Some credit should go to Hank Conger, really. Because of his exacting manager, and his own inquisitive mind, Conger has spent a lot of time reading up on the best catching techniques. Conger admitted that he’d read all about where Jason Castro said he put his butt in order to give the umpire a better look at lefties.

And Conger made sure Iannetta knew what he knew. “We talked about it a lot,” admitted Iannetta about framing and his former teammate. “We talked about it in the offseason. We texted. We talked about it all spring.”

One of the things they talked about was the positioning that Jeff Sullivan spotted. “I have wider shoulders, so I have to make sure they can see around me,” Iannetta said. “I try to angle my body, I’ve tried angling my body a little.”

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In the moment, it’s easy to focus only on the things that annoy you, on the things that you wish would be better. The greatest challenge in the world is to appreciate the moments that you get before you stop getting them, and it becomes all the more difficult when things aren’t going like you imagined. After the moment, everything shifts. The irritating bits fade into nothing, and what remains are images of the good times. In large part these are the principles driving the Angels’ sale of Josh Hamilton to the Rangers, and perhaps here more than anywhere else, it’s evident that the same thing can always be viewed in contrasting ways. The Angels see Hamilton in one way, the Rangers see him in another, and the great question concerns which side is closer to the truth. Josh Hamilton’s truth isn’t changing; it just happens to be somewhat unknown.

At its core, this really is just a baseball move. The Angels wouldn’t be paying for Josh Hamilton to go away if they thought he could still be a productive member of a contending team. And the Rangers are taking a shot because their financial risk will be laughably small, and they’re a team that could use a helpful left fielder. The Angels think they’ll be better for this, and the Rangers think they’ll be better for this. Obviously, it’s a little more complicated. It just always tends to come down to performance.

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Guess what! It’s time for my first pitch-framing post of the season. There will probably be dozens more of these. I don’t know what those ones will be about, but the purpose of this one is to highlight the early performance of Angels catcher Chris Iannetta. I know, of course, it’s super early! I know, of course, current statistical arrangements will change over the coming five and a half months. But so far, Iannetta rates as one of the top pitch-receivers in the game. He ranks very high according to Matthew Carruth’s method. He ranks very high according to the Baseball Prospectus method. And that one adjusts for a whole lot of stuff. Through these weeks, Iannetta has been getting strikes and avoiding balls.

Which some catchers do commonly. You know the guys who’re considered good at this. What makes Iannetta interesting is, this is a first for him. Not that the season is over and we’ve confirmed that he’s a good framer now, but he’s played like a good framer, and, previously, that hasn’t been him. Let’s go back four years. In all four years, by Carruth, Iannetta has rated as below-average. In all four years, by Baseball Prospectus, Iannetta has rated as below-average. As recently as 2013, Iannetta looked like one of the worst receivers in baseball, by the numbers. So you wouldn’t expect him to be where he is today.

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