Yesterday, we ranked baseball’s bullpens. Today, we turn our attention to the starters, beginning with the rotations that project in the bottom half of the league.

It’s not every day that you get to quote Tolstoy in an article that primarily consists of short descriptions of fifth starters, but trust me, I have a good reason for doing so. You know which quote I’m going for, presumably. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It’s trite, but it does such a good job of describing major league rotations that I couldn’t resist. I’m sure you’ll love the top 15 rotations when they get released. There’s a shiny ace at the top. He’s accompanied by a fairly good second banana, maybe even someone you could call a borderline number one starter. The guys behind them? They’re a mix of interesting young pitchers and accomplished veterans. If the team is lucky, they might even be a super-rotation, health permitting. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Dan Szymborski kicked off our reliever rankings. Now we’ll take a look at the bullpens projected to be baseball’s best.

There are some positions for which a cleaner, wider WAR gap exists between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, the combination of talent and depth that the Yankees and Braves have in right field separates them from the rest of baseball in a substantial way: There’s a projected 4-5 WAR gap between those clubs and the teams projected/ranked as high as sixth in right field. The projected WAR gap between the Phillies’ bullpen and that of the White Sox, ranked all the way down at 30, is only about that much, at 4.5 WAR. Relief pitching is not one of those positions with clear, WAR-driven demarcation from team to team, and bullpens on clubs with better rotations (and starters who eat up innings) are going to be punished for throwing fewer innings than those on teams that frequently deploy long relievers since WAR is a counting stat influenced by playing time. Read the rest of this entry »

After wrapping up our position player rankings with the league’s designated hitters, we turn our attention to the pitchers, starting with the bullpens in the bottom half of the reliever rankings.

One of my favorite jokes, which I’ve probably beaten into the ground at this point, is that there are three teams a year whose fans think they have a great bullpen, while those who root for the 27 other clubs are convinced that their team’s bullpen is the worst in baseball history and the primary reason they aren’t going to win the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »

Blaze Alexander is on the bubble to break camp with the Arizona Diamondbacks. His spring showing suggests he deserves the opportunity to do so. In 52 Cactus League plate appearances, the 24-year-old infield prospect has slashed .420/.442/.640 with seven extra-base hits and five stolen bases in as many attempts. Moreover, he’s continued to show promise since being taken in the 11th round of the 2018 draft out of IMG Academy. That he’s mostly flown under the radar while doing so is starting to change.

“I hope that’s the case,” Alexander told me in mid-March. “I mean, I’ve been putting on a pretty good performance this spring, so I definitely think I’m opening some eyes. That said, I obviously need to transfer it over to the regular season.”

The likelihood of his doing so in the big leagues was improved on Friday when the D-Backs released Elvis Andrus, a notable roster move given that the 15-year veteran had been inked to a free agent contract as a potential backup for Geraldo Perdomo. As it now stands, there is a good chance that Alexander — “a viable defensive shortstop with a huge arm… [who] hits for enough power” in the words of Eric Longenhagen — will be filling that role.

Hitting for power isn’t one of Alexander’s aims, nor is it part of his process. While he does possess pop — his ledger includes 30 home runs in 734 plate appearances over the past two minor-league seasons — his M.O. is bullets, not blasts. Read the rest of this entry »

We conclude our rankings of the game’s position players with a deep dive on designated hitters.

Back when the DH rule was introduced in 1973 (has it really been five decades?), the role was often filled by aging and/or physically compromised sluggers who were in the lineup on a regular basis. Boston’s Orlando Cepeda played in 142 games, while Minnesota’s Tony Oliva played in 146 and the California Angels’ Frank Robinson saw action in 147. All were in their mid-to-late 30s, and save for Robinson’s 17 games in left field, all were exclusively designated hitters. The Tigers differed in that they platooned at the position, but it was with an otherwise similar script. Gates Brown and Frank Howard, both at the tail end of their careers, combined to play in just three games with a glove in hand. Read the rest of this entry »

The regular season starts in about a week, which means there isn’t much time left to sign free agents and integrate them into the team before games start to count. In some cases, in fact, there’s no time; Blake Snell won’t be ready for Opening Day, so any pitchers who haven’t signed yet surely won’t be either. But there’s one player who could probably fall out of bed and into a starting lineup next Thursday, and the Mets just signed him:

Breaking: JD Martinez to Mets. $12M

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) March 22, 2024

J.D. Martinez is offense in a can. He plays DH, so he doesn’t need to learn who he’s throwing to or catching from. He’s well traveled, so this isn’t his first rodeo. And the Mets could use some offense, which means this signing lines up on many axes. At one year and $12 million, the contract is right. There’s just one question: How good will he be?

If you listen to our projections, Martinez is squarely on the downside of his career. ZiPS and Steamer project him for a 106 and 105 wRC+, respectively, with a ton of strikeouts offsetting strong power numbers. All DHs across baseball racked up a collective 106 wRC+ last year. It’s not exactly replacement level, but it doesn’t seem particularly hard to find someone capable of putting up that level of offense.

A counterpoint, though: Martinez just finished a season where he hit .271/.321/.572, good for a 135 wRC+. The year before that, he was at 119, and 126 the year before that. Sure, he’s not the fearsome, MVP-caliber hitter he was in 2017 and 2018, but there’s plenty of room to be worse than that and still great. His statline didn’t look particularly fluky; he posted a .301 ISO, meaningfully higher than his career mark, but he earned that production with a ton of hard contact. He posted the second-highest barrel rate of his career, the highest hard-hit rate, and put the ball in the air frequently to take advantage of all that thunder.

There are a lot of components to analyze, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to one question: Should we trust 2023, or the projections of 2024? If the Mets get some semblance of what the Dodgers got, this is a whale of a deal. If they get something closer to league average, the whole package is a lot less exciting. Let’s see if we can pick up on any patterns that suggest one or the other.

The big worry with Martinez’s game is that he strikes out a lot. His 31.1% mark in 2023 represented a new career high, but he’s always been a high-risk, high-reward hitter. Nearly every contact frequency and swing decision metric declined from the prior year:

That didn’t really harm Martinez last year. It seems like his plan was pretty straightforward. Swing hard, because you might hit it, more or less. You can live with a lot more misses if you downright wallop the ball when you connect, and that’s just what Martinez did. Those strikeouts have never sunk his offense; he has a career 132 wRC+ with a career 24.7% strikeout rate. Projection systems think he’ll strike out quite a bit next year — because of course they do — but that’s never stopped him from crushing.

Are Martinez’s lack of walks last year behind his lackluster projections? They’ve never been a huge part of his game in the first place, but 2023 marked one of the lowest walk rates of his decade-long offensive renaissance. No sweat from either Steamer or ZiPS there, though; they think he’ll rebound toward career norms.

No, the place they think Martinez will fall short is what happens after he hits the ball. I’m talking 10 fewer homers in 70 extra plate appearances, an epic power outage. I think the reason is pretty simple; 2023 was an outlier for him when it came specifically to power. He’s always run a high BABIP. He’s always hit a lot of doubles, particularly in Boston. But he hit homers on 6.9% of his plate appearances last year, the second-highest rate of his career, behind only his torrid 2017 season (.303/.376/.690, 167 wRC+). You probably can’t bet on that continuing.

In other words, the projections are based on a grain of truth, as they always are. If you’re trying to figure out how this signing will fail, it’s the general passage of time combined with regression. Martinez will keep striking out a lot, because those tend to be sticky. He’ll hit fewer bombs, because those are more variable. He’ll hit for a bit less BABIP, too, and of course he’s getting older, so sprinkle in a bit of decline everywhere, and presto change-o, you’ve turned Martinez into merely a decent hitter instead of a great one.

I don’t really buy that interpretation of the data, though. Projection systems obviously do a great job in the aggregate, but I think they’re missing the arrow of causality here. I don’t think Martinez struck out more, sustainably, and happened to hit the ball hard, unsustainably. I think that the two are linked, and that he took an attack-heavy approach understanding the inherent tradeoffs. I think it’s reasonable to project more power this year, though probably not last year’s Baseball Savant-incinerating red flames:

Split the difference between our projections and last season, and you get roughly what I’m expecting. Bunches of homers, bunches of strikeouts, and plenty of hard contact for singles and doubles mixed in. The Mets could use that kind of offense to anchor their lineup, which we think will end up in the middle of the pack in run scoring despite some excellent hitters at the top of the lineup.

The plate appearances that Martinez will soak up wouldn’t have been great, to say the least. There would’ve been a lot of Mark Vientos in there, and perhaps a heaping helping of Tyrone Taylor. Francisco Alvarez was always going to get his fair share of DH at-bats when he’s not catching, and maybe Martinez cuts down on those, but there are limits to how often you should play your catcher at DH from a rest perspective. Brandon Nimmo was the other likely beneficiary of DH time. He’s a great hitter, but who would cover for him in the outfield? This is a meaningful offensive upgrade, is my point.

Does this signing make the Mets playoff favorites? Not to me. I think they’re still a little bit short, largely because their pitching staff is somehow risky in terms of both talent and availability. But I like this signing a lot anyway. It’s the kind of move that David Stearns frequently made in Milwaukee, and it usually paid off there. If you build your team in such a way that it can add players who fetch less than expected in free agency, then go out and add those guys opportunistically, you end up with a good roster, though not always in the way you expected.

I never would have linked Martinez to the Mets at the start of this offseason. They seemed more likely to dip their toes into the pitching market, which is exactly what they did, signing Sean Manaea and Luis Severino. They traded for Adrian Houser and Taylor when the Brewers wanted to shed 40-man spots. In doing all of that, the Mets saved some money, which meant that when Martinez was available for less than initially forecast, they had the room to add, and the team composition to make it work.

I don’t think this deal will change the course of the 2024 season. I don’t think that his posting a 105 or 115 wRC+ will move mountains. I do think, however, that this move makes a ton of sense. It’s not a standalone attempt to fix the team. It’s not a blockbuster contract. It’s just a part of a larger philosophy of team construction: Getting good players on reasonable deals tends to pay off. And one added benefit to throw in at the end of this list, since I’ve already made my case that it’s a good signing: Everyone seems to love working with Martinez. He’s a student of hitting who would make Ted Williams proud. If you can justify the deal before adding that, that’s quite the throw-in.

I’ve wanted to write about Daulton Varsho for a long time. As a catcher turned elite defensive outfielder, he’s had a rare career progression. Because of that, he’s been one of my favorite players to watch. But I’m not here to talk about his defense, or even his elite baserunning for that matter. Instead, the focus is going to be on his one non-elite skill: his bat.

Through 1,603 career plate appearances, Varsho has a 96 wRC+. He was a slightly above-average hitter from 2021-2022, but he took a big step back in his first year with the Blue Jays, posting an 85 wRC+ across 581 plate appearances. His peripherals were about the same as they were the previous year, but his output was significantly worse. It was confusing to see. The expectation was that he would make a leap in his third full season, and the projections supported that. ZiPS’ median projection had him pegged for a 117 OPS+; his actual production ended up being a bottom decile outcome. Despite the regression, ZiPS is still confident Varsho can be a little better than league average with the bat this season, with a projected 107 wRC+.

Any hitter who saw as big of a drop as Varsho did last year would be keen to overhaul his process, though at times it can be difficult to determine what part of the profile needs the most attention. Luckily for Varsho, his was an obvious diagnosis that had little to do with his approach; his swing decisions actually improved in 2023. Instead, the problem can be found in his bat tracking data.

Let’s quickly redefine some terms before starting the analysis. First is Vertical Entry Angle (VEA): Sourcing the definition (and data) from SwingGraphs, VEA is the vertical angle of the bat approximately 83 milliseconds before contact, or in other words, the angle of the bat relative to the ground at the start of the down swing. Then there is Vertical Bat Angle (VBA), something I’ve cited many times in previous work. VBA is the angle of the bat relative to the ground at contact. Lastly, there is Attack Angle (AA), which represents the vertical direction of the bat at contact.

Each of these measurements are important for understanding any hitter. The way they work and interact with one another can tell the story of a swing. For Varsho, the way these measurements work together is especially important because he tends to live on the extreme ends of them. Here is a table summarizing his VBA and AA relative to the league:

Varsho’s VBA is consistently one of the lowest in baseball. That means on average, his bat is flatter at the point of contact than most of the league. While it’s important to note that VBA is dependent on pitch height (VBA decreases as you move up in the zone), it’s not as if Varsho is only making contact with high pitches and that alone is the reason for his low mark. In fact, his contact heights are typically average or below average – not exactly the hitter you’d expect to have a VBA this low. Then, when it comes to AA, his mark was among the highest in 2022 and above average in 2023. Both years, he was among the leaders in positive differential between VBA and AA (AA > VBA). That is interesting, and perhaps a big red flag considering his profile as a hitter.

There is no such thing as an absolute in baseball – there is always room for departure from the norm – but it’s typically not optimal for a hitter to change the angle of his bat this much through his swing. If you hit the ball hard, you can probably make it work better than most, but Varsho doesn’t have that kind of room for error. Taking the bat off its natural plane of movement will likely result in lots of mishits. Unsurprisingly, Varsho was among the league leaders in pop-up rate in 2023. This swing profile is far from ideal, especially because he doesn’t have the power to overcome the deficiencies. Now is a good time to pivot to VEA and its role in Varsho’s swing.

I did not include VEA in the table because the number is best represented by a range, since the metric is still a work in progress at SwingGraphs and the capture rate isn’t always consistent. From September 2022 through last season, Varsho’s VEA has fluctuated between 42 and 48 degrees. That means he tends to flatten his bat from the start of the downswing through contact at a range between 16 to 21 degrees. Again, that is among the highest in baseball, if not the very highest.

Here is a quick screenshot of about where VEA is captured:

So, from the point you see above to contact (VEA to VBA), he flattens his bat angle a ton. That helps put the pieces of Varsho’s swing puzzle together. Think about it from a reciprocal movement perspective. How you set yourself up to move will directly impact the next step in the kinetic chain. If your bat is pointing upward as the downswing begins, then its natural response is to have a vertically oriented path through the ball, hence Varsho’s high VEA into high AA. By making his barrel flat at impact (despite moving it on an upward path), he’s forcing it off its natural path, which has a negative effect on his contact quality. Let’s watch a few swings from last year to remember what his swing actually looks like:

There are some swings where it goes right and others where it goes wrong. What’s clear even from this handful is that Varsho tinkered with his hand placement throughout last season, perhaps in an attempt to get comfortable through a bumpy year. When he spoke to David Laurila a few weeks ago, he discussed his mindset at the plate. After Laurila pointed out to Varsho that he pulls the ball more often than any hitter in the league and followed up by asking if Varsho wanted to lift the ball, the Jays outfielder made it clear that his thought process is to hit grounders. This stuck out to me – not because of any criticism of the old school mindset – but because of how he sets his swing up.

As I’ve pointed out, Varsho’s VEA puts him in line for a steep swing, but his intent to hit the ball on the ground plays out through his flat VBA. The flat VBA itself isn’t the issue. Plenty of other hitters have success with it. It’s that he doesn’t optimally set himself up to have a flat swing. If he started his downswing flatter, he would be in a better position to execute on the flat swing he intends to have. Cue 2024 spring training:

Well, I’m intrigued. Yeah, the results are better in the small sample, but that doesn’t really matter here. This is as sound of a process as I could have imagined for Varsho. If his goal is to have a low, line drive oriented swing, then this is how he should set up for it.
He points his bat down in his stance to remind him to keep the bat flat as he starts his swing. The open stance is probably a comfort thing, but it could help create more space for him to get his bat going deeper in the zone. That’s something easier to do with a flat bat path than a steep one. Either way, these adjustments align with his stated plan and the other components of his swing.

As of now, it’s unclear whether these changes will result in the offensive breakout we were expecting last year. We’ll need regular season data to answer that question. But what it does do is prove that Varsho is cleaning up his process and matching his mental plan to his physical mechanics. That’s important. If he can return to his league-average hitting, it’ll be enough to make him a valuable player, given his elite fielding and baserunning. If he can be better than that, he’ll emerge as one of the game’s more talented stars. For now, let’s see how April goes.

I want to stress how outrageous it is that Michael Lorenzen was not the first former Cal State Fullerton two-way player to sign a free agent contract this winter. The guy who beat him to the punch, J.D. Davis, played 144 games for the Giants last year, starting 116 of them at third base. He’d gone through arbitration. More to the point, on March 1 he was the presumptive starter for a team with playoff aspirations, and he was under contract on March 10.

Then Davis got cut in order to save a few bucks in the wake of the Matt Chapman signing, and he ended up signing for less than half of his original salary with the Oakland A’s. There, he’ll be managed by Mark Kotsay, a former Cal State Fullerton two-way player.

While all of that was happening, Lorenzen was sitting by the phone. Or more likely, given his physique, he was lifting the phone just to get a good pump in, even though the only sound on the other end was a dial tone. Finally, overnight just six days before his team’s first regular season game, Lorenzen has a deal with the Texas Rangers: One year, $4.5 million, with an additional $2.5 million possible in incentives. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Leo Morgenstern and Davy Andrews previewed left and center field. Now we round out the outfield positions with a look at right field.

Last year, right field boasted the two best players in the National League… sort of. While Ronald Acuña Jr. finally picked up where he left off before tearing his right ACL in July 2021, becoming the first player to combine at least 40 homers and at least 70 stolen bases in the same season, Mookie Betts had his best season as a Dodger. The pair finished first and second in the majors in wRC+ (170 to 167 in Acuña’s favor) and virtually tied for the lead in WAR (8.3 apiece). The wrinkle was that the diminutive Dodger — who had already banked six Gold Gloves and an MVP award while climbing to ninth in JAWS as a right fielder — did a substantial amount his work as a middle infielder, starting 62 games at second base and another 12 at shortstop without missing a beat. That versatility helped the Dodgers compensate for the loss of Gavin Lux to his own ACL tear, and it was enabled by an impressive comeback by 33-year-old Jason Heyward, whom the Dodgers plucked off the scrapheap and slotted into a well-defined platoon role in right. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today we published the positional power rankings for center field. For the first time since 2013, and for just the third time in the history of the positional power rankings, the Angels are not in the top spot. To put this changing of the guard in perspective, I went back and read all of the entries about Mike Trout and the Angels. This article is not a eulogy. Instead, we are here today to commemorate his greatness. It’s a retrospective of sorts, both of Trout’s peak and our coverage of it, but I would remind you that he’s not yet reached the compiling phase of his Hall of Fame career. In fact, among center fielders, only Aaron Judge is projected for a higher wRC+ than Trout this season. The Angels still rank fourth, despite the fact that Trout is projected to play less center field and more DH this season because Shohei Ohtani is no longer on the team. Trout is only 32, and it would hardly be surprising if he returns to the 160ish wRC+ that both we and the projections have come to expect.

Besides, praising Trout is one of main the reasons I’m writing here at all. I started reading FanGraphs religiously sometime between 2014 and 2016. I had a lot of free time at work, and I spent pretty much all of it doing what you’re doing right now. At some point, we switched from a cubicle farm to an open office. Concerned that everyone would be able to see my computer screen, I remember wondering whether I’d have to quit, or whether I’d be able to devise some way to hide the fact that, rather than working, I was just reading the same green website all day. I never did figure out how to hide it, but it turned out that nobody seemed to mind much. What I loved most of all, what turned me into a moderately knowledgeable baseball person, was reading about Mike Trout.

I know that many people, the sainted Sam Miller chief among them, have done incredible writing about Trout elsewhere. But to me personally, Trout is the player whose career is most tightly intertwined with the story of this site. His ascent as an all-around superstar, along with the agita surrounding the race for the 2013 AL MVP, made him the poster boy for advanced metrics in general and WAR in particular. Here was a player whose greatness was visible, but whose contributions in every facet of the game added up to more than the eye could see and way more than the Triple Crown stats could tell you. And here was a website full of great writers who couldn’t wait to show you — with graphs and GIFs and gags — how to appreciate that greatness and recognize it for yourself. Could Trout end up with the most WAR ever? Could he be as valuable to the Angels as LeBron James was to his team? How much was his production actually worth? How the hell did he hit a home run on this pitch? Or this pitch? Where would he rank according to a brand new stat?

Sometimes my wife does this thing that I love: We’ll just be sitting on the couch making each other laugh, and she’ll stop and say, “We’re so happy.” It’s true. We are so happy. But it’s also obvious enough that you might think there’s no reason to say it. You’d be wrong. We’re not going to be newlyweds forever, and it really is important to appreciate just how good we have it. In 2014, August Fagerstrom expressed that sentiment in the first of what turned into a series of check-ins about Trout’s place in history: “You might be tired of hearing or reading about Mike Trout, but you really shouldn’t be. Don’t take this one for granted… enough can’t be said about him.” A writer’s job is to ask interesting questions. Trout’s greatness has been such that for 12 years now, those questions have often been about the exact same topic. Somehow, the writers here have done an incredible job of finding creative ways to make sure we appreciate it, of fighting what Justin Klugh called “the normalization of Mike Trout’s massive talent.” If David Appelman were to collect the best articles about Trout from the past 10 years and publish them in a book, I’d buy the hell out of it. They changed my life. In fact, here’s one of the very first things I ever wrote for FanGraphs, just a few months before I’d get my first chance at actual baseball writing. Please ignore the superfluous comma.

All of this writing was and still is necessary because Trout has been so good for so long that it can be hard to wrap your arms around his greatness. Julio Rodríguez is a megastar with a mega-contract who finally displaced Trout by starting his career with back-to-back seasons worth 5-plus WAR at ages 21 and 22. But Trout, a year younger than Rodríguez in his rookie season, started out with back-to-back 10-win campaigns, excluding his 40-game cup of coffee as in 2011, his age-19 season. Over each of their first two full seasons, Trout was worth nine more WAR than Rodríguez! He averaged 8.9 WAR during his first eight seasons, then he put up 2.5 WAR in 2020, the equivalent of 6.8 WAR in a full season. In 2019, Angels center fielders were projected 9.2 WAR, more than double our projection for the Brewers, the no. 2 team at the position. That was the median projection, and the Halos fell short only because Trout missed nearly 30 games. It’s bonkers, and again, that’s just the peak. As recently as 2022, he put up 6.0 WAR in 119 games. Last season, the miserable slog that got him dethroned, he still put up the 11th-most WAR among all center fielders despite playing just 82 games, and if you look only at value accrued while playing center, he moves up to seventh, with 3.1 WAR in 79 games. From the very beginning, putting Trout’s career into a comprehensible context has required a healthy dose of ingenuity from our writers. It’s like a diagram of a skyscraper; you need that tiny picture of a human at the bottom just to remind you of what normal human scale looks like.

Speaking of scale, Trout has consistently destroyed the graphs that started appearing with the positional power rankings in 2014. He was blowing the curve not for a high school math class, but for the very best baseball players in the world. Year after year, his bar on the far the left dwarfed every other center fielder in baseball until, gradually, it didn’t.

The positional power rankings started in 2012, just in time for a certain toolsy center fielder to be name-checked as “the uber-prospect Mike Trout.” He was also projected for 100 PAs in left field. The ZiPS projections for Peter Bourjos and Vernon Wells were a little too rosy, but uber-prospect or not, no one could have been prepared for the .326/.399/.564 slash line that Trout put up in his rookie season. As you can tell from the tables, things were a little rough and ready back then. Fun fact: This table also represents the lowest ranking the Angels have ever had in center field.

By 2013, both the projections and the authors of the rankings were ready to crown Trout. On his own, he was projected for 6.8 WAR, nearly a full win above Andrew McCutchen’s Pirates in first place. However, Trout was still projected to spend most of his time in left in order to make room for Bourjos in center. “He’s a star even if his performance figures to take a slight step back following one of the best rookie seasons we’ll ever see,” wrote Mike Axisa. Over in left field, where a partial season from Trout was enough to lift the Angels into second place, Michael Barr called Trout, “The statistical community consensus AL MVP and real-world runner up,” but cautioned that, “it would probably be foolish to project a repeat of one of the greatest offensive performances in recent history.” He was right: Trout wouldn’t repeat his performance; he’d be even better.

In 2014, Jason Collette started his introduction by explaining why the graph looked so weird: “If you’ve been looking at the scale of these charts and wondering why we set the top end of the range to +9 when the best team is usually closer to +6, here’s your answer. Stupid Mike Trout.” He then called Trout, “the best player at his position, nee [sic], the game,” which will never not make me laugh. In 2015, Craig Edwards repeated what by that point had become a refrain: “Mike Trout is the best player in baseball, and it is not particularly close.” In 2016, Trout was simply “the best in the world.” (Also, let’s briefly remember Trout’s projected backups in those seasons: JB Shuck, Collin Cowgill, Craig Gentry, and Rafael Ortega!)

That’s when the player capsules about Trout started changing a bit. By 2017, it wasn’t enough just to acknowledge Trout’s greatness. Some poetry was necessary. “There is no one at his level,” wrote Dave Cameron. “There is no one near his level. There is no one on a level that can see Trout’s level from their level.” Just a year later, Trout had been so good for so long that it was assumed. His dominance had reached its hipster phase, and it was time for some snark. “Just in case you hadn’t thought about it enough recently,” wrote Jeff Sullivan, “Mike Trout is good.” In 2019, Dan Szymborski saved his snark for the question of whether the Angels would ever actually put a winning team around Trout: “It’s not the steak’s fault if someone puts ketchup on it.” Craig Edwards got topical in 2020: “He also wears a mask around others because it is known to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. He truly is an MVP.”

The big shift came in 2021. That was the first time an author considered the possibility that some young star might actually overtake Trout on the rankings. Brendan Gawlowski named five candidates: Luis Robert Jr., Ramón Laureano, Trent Grisham, Kyle Lewis, and Cristian Pache. None of them has topped Trout yet, and when push came to shove, Gawlowski wrote, “One of these years, he’ll slow down but if 2021 is the season, the projections will be as surprised and disappointed as anyone.” By 2022, Ben Clemens gave voice to the reality depicted in the bar graph: “He’s still the king… But after a decade on top, Trout’s hold on the No. 1 spot has loosened.” Ben noted that although the bat was still there, Trout’s issues were durability and defense.

That brings us to 2023, when Michael Baumann went so far as to invite another center fielder into the top tier, calling Trout and Rodríguez “the two clear best center fielders in baseball, and writing, “If anyone were to displace Trout as the premier center fielder in the game, Rodríguez is the most likely candidate.” That day, so long in coming, is finally here.

I can’t tell you how much fun it was to write this article. It was also difficult, because the authors here — one of whom works in the front office of the team that finally wrested the top spot from the Angels — have written so, so many fun things about Mike Trout. I spent hours getting lost in them when I should have been writing. Below are links to every year of the center field positional power rankings, as well as the left field entries from 2012 and 2013. I’d also encourage you to simply explore the blog roll of articles about Trout. Scroll around and click on anything with a title that sounds fun. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, and I’m sure we’ll keep writing fun things about Trout for a long time to come.

2012 (CF) – 2012 (LF) – 2013 (CF) – 2013 (LF) – 2014 – 2015 – 2016 – 2017 – 2018 – 2019 – 2020 – 2021 – 2022 – 2023 – 2024