The Angels control a beautiful and valuable thing, Mike Trout’s age-25 to -28 seasons, what should mark his prime. The baseball world awaits to see what the club is able to do with this precious asset, and how the Angels will supplement it. If the club holds Trout and struggles to compete in the AL West, it would be akin to purchasing Cezanne’s “The Card Players” and then proceeding to lock the painting in a secure storage facility for few to enjoy.

Baseball, and the Angels, would do well to have Trout involved in postseason games.

Will the Angels help Trout to his first postseason at-bats since 2014 this October? We’ll see. FanGraphs’ projections have the Angels as an 84-win team at the moment, which is tied for the second-best mark in the AL West after the Astros, who are projected to win 90 games.

The projections foresee a logjam after the respective division favorite Red Sox, Indians and Astros. The forecast has the Angels tied with the Mariners and Blue Jays for the fourth-best mark in the AL, the Tigers and Rangers with 83 wins, and the Yankees and Rays with 82.

It’s a January forecast of October. Presumably, much can and will go wrong with it. But perhaps what we can take from it is that there could potentially be a crowded Wild Card field, and the Angels could be in the middle of it. That potential scenario means every transaction, every decision, could carry significance for a team like the Angels. Not only are the Angels in a position where each additional win could be immensely valuable, but we also know that they can’t expect much help from a thin farm system to provide depth.

That brings us to Luis Valbuena, who officially signed a two-year, $15 million deal with the Angels on Tuesday. For a player who has averaged 2.1 WAR during the last four seasons, it seems like a solid investment for the club. Dave Cameron wrote that Valbuena is similar in value to Mark Trumbo, who earned more than twice the guaranteed dollars of Valbuena’s agreement in his new deal.

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Last Thursday, two free-agent hitters found homes, with Mark Trumbo returning to Baltimore and Luis Valbuena switching AL West cities, going from Houston to Anaheim. While the expectation was that Trumbo was going to sign something of an albatross contract — I named him the No. 1 Free Agent Landmine heading into the off-season — he ended up signing for a perfectly reasonable price; $37.5 million over three years. While the Orioles will need to resist the urge to put him in the outfield anymore, $12.5 million a year for what Trumbo can do at the plate is not some kind of franchise-killing overpay.

The Orioles did fine here, mostly; you could argue that they could have spent even less and gotten Chris Carter, a similar-enough player, but not making the most cost-efficient move doesn’t make this a disaster. Trumbo is a solid enough big leaguer, and $38 million in MLB these days just isn’t that much money.

I say all that up front to clarify that the rest of this post isn’t a criticism of the Orioles’ decision to retain Mark Trumbo. I just thought the juxtaposition of Trumbo and Valbuena signing on the same day was interesting because, well, look for yourself.

Over the last three years, Trumbo and Valbuena have both established themselves as useful players, mostly based on their ability to hit the ball out of the ballpark. Trumbo has a bit more power, but Valbuena draws more walks, and thus gets on base more often, so he’s actually been the better hitter of the two during that time. Oh, and Valbuena’s also a little faster, so he’s added a little extra baserunning value, expanding his lead even a bit more. Over these three years, Valbuena has been worth +23 runs relative to a league average hitter, while Trumbo has come in at +11.

Now, sometimes, multi-year comparisons aren’t all that helpful in figuring out why player valuations diverge, because the more recent data is the most important one. And of course, Trumbo is coming off the best year of his career, as he put up a 123 wRC+ last year. But in this case, looking at just the most recent year doesn’t change things much, because interestingly, Valbuena also put up a 123 wRC+ last year, the best mark he’s put up in his career. This isn’t a case of one guy trending up and the other trending down; both were good hitters last year, and they’ve both been above-average hitters the last three years.

There isn’t an age factor here either. Valbuena was born in November of 1985, Trumbo of January of 1986. They are both 31, at the point where we can expect both to start declining in value, but not old enough where a catastrophic drop-off is imminent.

There are, though, two differences between Valbuena and Trumbo; the thing I find fascinating about these contracts is how those two differences drive the valuations.

The first difference is that Valbuena has some defensive value, and if he ends up playing a lot of first base — with Albert Pujols questionable for the start of the year, that sounds likely — he might end up being a solid defensive first baseman. In nearly 4,000 innings at third base, Valbuena has a career +10 UZR (though it has been worse the last few years) and as a former middle infielder, he’s more athletic than most guys who end up playing first base. Valbuena probably isn’t going to be a gold glover at first, but as a guy with the flexibility to play both corners and potentially be an asset at first base, there’s some real defensive value here. Trumbo is a solid defender at first base, but that position is blocked in Baltimore, so he’s either a liability in the outfield or a designated hitter, and won’t be adding defensive value in either case.

So, Valbuena has been a better offensive player the last three years, matched Trumbo’s wRC+ last year in the best year of Trumbo’s career, and adds some defensive value as well. I’ve held off including it as of yet since it can often be the only thing people focus on, but it’s worth noting that Valbuena has been worth +6.3 WAR over the last three years, while Trumbo is at +2.0. By overall production the last few years, it isn’t even really close; Valbuena has been significantly better.

And yet, while Trumbo got 3/$37.5 million with the qualifying offer attached, Valbuena got 2/$15M, despite not being tied to draft pick compensation. The market looked at these same-aged players and preferred Trumbo, despite a lack of a massive offensive advantage and definite defensive limitations.

Why? Because there remains a significant difference in how teams value everyday guys versus platoon players, and fair or not, Trumbo is seen as a player you can stick in your lineup regardless of who is pitching, while Valbuena is viewed as a part-time player.

With Trumbo, you’re basically getting the same thing no matter who is pitching; his career wRC+ splits are 113/110, so you can put him in the lineup and expect mostly the same production everyday. Valbuena, like most left-handed hitters, runs a bit larger split, with a career 86/98 wRC+ split against lefties and righties, and an even more extreme 79/126 split over the last three years. Valbuena’s entire emergence as a quality hitter has been based on his ability to hit for power against right-handed pitching; against lefties, he still hits like the middle infielder he came up as.

A corner infielder who hits lefties like Valbuena hits lefties shouldn’t be starting against them, so the Angels are almost certainly going to platoon him, and the fact that they have to pay another player — and more importantly, dedicate another roster spot — to a guy to share his job dramatically discounts his value on the market. Full-time guys get paid on a different scale than part-time guys, and Valbuena is a seen as a part-time guy, so he gets less than Trumbo despite the performance advantages he’s displayed of late.

But I wonder if the discount being applied between the two groups is too heavy, because while it makes plenty of sense to platoon Valbuena and get a higher overall level of production, you don’t actually have to. The Angels could choose to play Valbuena everyday and save the roster spot for some other use, if they really see it being a significant negative to have to carry a right-handed first baseman to share that job. And if we just project Valbuena out to Trumbo-like playing time, it’s still not clear that Trumbo is significantly better.

Let’s just say the Angels decided to just play Valbuena mostly everyday, not platooning him more heavily than any other left-handed hitter is. In general, LHBs who get about 600 PA per season end up having the platoon advantage in about 70-75% of their plate appearances, we’ll use 73% just to split the difference. With exactly 600 PAs, that would mean Valbuena would get 438 PAs against RHPs and 162 against LHPs.

Let’s take a fairly extreme position, and say that his true talent platoon split right now is something like 90/110 wRC+ — remember, that’s almost double Valbuena’s career 12 point split — which is actually a pretty significant split as far as MLB players go.

If we give him the 73/27 distribution of PAs that most regular LHBs get, that would work out to something like this in a regular role.

That 105 wRC+ is an almost exact match for the average of the ZIPS and Steamer projections for Valbuena in 2016; Steamer is on the low side at 99 overall, while ZIPS is up at 113, so their blended average is 106. So that at least passes the smell test. But we don’t know what percentage of platoon advantage those systems were projecting, and since neither had him forecasted for 600 PAs, we should assume they’re probably letting him face a higher proportion of RHPs. So let’s make Valbuena a little worse than those overall projection numbers, and re-run the estimate to give us something a bit worse than what ZIPS and Steamer are projecting him for in part-time duty.

In this estimate, we’re being pretty harsh on Valbuena; his wRC+ against RHP goes down 21 points from what it was the last three years, while his vs LHP number only bounces up six points, and is still below his career average. This is probably pretty close to what Steamer is projecting Valbuena’s splits at, and it is definitely the more negative outlook, given his recent track record.

But even with that pessimism, Valbuena still projects as a league-average hitter while playing everyday. Trumbo projects for a 110 wRC+ as an everyday guy, in both ZIPS and Steamer, so the forecasts agree that, for next year, you’d rather have Trumbo’s bat than Valbuena’s, especially if you’re not willing to use a roster spot to platoon Valbuena with an RHB.

But the difference between a 110 and a 100 wRC+ over 600 plate appearances is about seven runs. That’s not nothing; that’s most of the way to one extra win. But then, there’s the baserunning, where Valbuena makes up some of that gap. And then there’s the defensive value, which isn’t trivial. If you give Valbuena some credit for being able to still play third, he probably makes back a few of those runs, and in the end, we’re looking at a gap of a couple of runs between full-time Trumbo and full-time Valbuena, if there’s any gap at all.

And full-time Valbuena is an inefficiency; with just a modicum of work, you can find a decent right-hander to face left-handed starters, and end up with a better overall rate of production. Yeah, it costs you a roster spot and that guy doesn’t play for free, so his cost has to be factored into the equation, but most teams carry a right-handed bench bat anyway, and if you have to pay a slight premium to get a guy who is worth starting occasionally, you still come out ahead overall.

The big story this winter has been the market correction on bat-only corner guys, but interestingly, the Valbuena signing points out that there’s even more room for those kinds of guys to come down in price in the future. Instead of paying even this reduced rate for the full-time slugger, signing a guy with a platoon player label at the discount currently being applied is an even cheaper way to get similar production.

Maybe the most painful part of writing about baseball for a living is that your biases — the same biases of which we’re all guilty — are constantly laid bare for everyone to see. Vladimir Guerrero reminded me of that problem most recently.

David Wright and Joey Votto embody my first bias. Plate discipline was a way to find great hitters! I’d read Moneyball and used it to draft Chipper Jones first in my first fantasy league, back in 2001, and I was money. I had baseball all figured out.

Good one, early 2000s dude. Good one.

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Whenever conventional wisdom and the numbers — or whatever conclusion I have drawn from the numbers — differ, I’m left wondering why such a difference exists. Many times there’s a good reason; other times, the reasons make less sense. One situation where my conclusions appear to differ from conventional wisdom comes in the form of Vladimir Guerrero and his case for the Hall of Fame. When recently considering Guerrero’s statistical credentials for the Hall, he seemed to fall short of the voting standards for most recent candidates who gained induction. At the same time, his name currently appears on 75% of this year’s ballots according to Ryan Thibodaux’s tracker. So what gives?

The easy answer is that voters — due to Guerrero’s brilliance and flair at the plate — are willing either to minimize or forgive entirely Guerrero’s defense and baserunning, as well as the fact that his last above-average season occurred at age-33. They aren’t necessarily wrong, as he certainly has a case by virtue of his peak and career WAR numbers. He also recorded a very good .318 career batting average and an MVP award. Plus, from 1997 to 2006, his 114 assists topped all outfielders, with his great arm obscuring his lack of range and errors, in which category (errors) he also topped MLB during that time. That’s probably the most reasonable explanation for why I concluded he was just below the cusp for the Hall of Fame — certainly worthy of consideration, but not a certain Hall of Famer like the voters appear close to making him.

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What type of contract would Mike Trout have commanded this offseason had he been a free agent? Coming off an MVP-award-winning campaign in which he compiled 9.4 WAR and about to enter just his age-25 season, Trout would have easily been one of the most sought after players ever to hit the open market. And given the state of this year’s historically weak free-agent class, the bidding for Trout may very likely have ended up in the $400-500 million range over eight to ten years.

Considering that Trout signed a six-year, $144.5 million contract extension back in 2014 – an agreement that runs through 2020 – this is just an interesting, but hypothetical, thought experiment, right?

Not necessarily. A relatively obscure provision under California law — specifically, Section 2855 of the California Labor Code — limits all personal services contracts (i.e., employment contracts) in the state to a maximum length of seven years. In other words, this means that if an individual were to sign an employment contract in California lasting eight or more years, then at the conclusion of the seventh year the employee would be free to choose to either continue to honor the agreement, or else opt out and seek employment elsewhere.

Although the California legislature has previously considered eliminating this protection for certain professional athletes – including Major League Baseball players – no such amendment has passed to date. Consequently, Section 2855 would presumptively apply to any player employed by one of the five major-league teams residing in California.

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Every full season Mike Trout has put together as a Major League Baseball player has been great. Through his age-24 season, Mike Trout has been worth roughly 48 Wins Above Replacement, averaging around +9.5 wins per season. Through age-24, that is more than any other player, with Ty Cobb a close second, and Mickey Mantle, Mel Ott, Jimmie Foxx, and Ted Williams a bit further behind. Trout is already in third place through age-25, 10th place through age-26, and 23rd place through age-27 with three seasons to be played before he gets there. Mike Trout is great. Everybody knows that.

But what would happen if Mike Trout had a good year in comparison to, well, Mike Trout?

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One of the complaints people make about us for some reason is that we spend too much time talking about how awesome Mike Trout is. I could issue the same complaint about those people in reverse: Clearly, they don’t spend enough time talking or thinking about how awesome Mike Trout is. He’s not just some great player, right? It’s not like you talk about Mike Trout in the same breath as Jose Bautista or Robinson Cano. Last year, Trout was better than the next-best position player by a full WAR. Over the past three years, Trout has been better than the next-best position player by more than 3 WAR. Over the past five years, Trout has been better than the next-best position player by 15 WAR. By 15 WAR! Looking at Steamer projections, over a constant denominator, there’s Trout’s projected WAR, at 7.8. And then there’s Manny Machado, at 5.9.

This is another Mike Trout puff piece, in a way. I like it because it serves a purpose, I like it because it’s simple, and I like it because I got to write the same damn article last spring. The offseason isn’t over, and certain teams are still going to make certain additions. But it’s a near guarantee the following will remain true: Mostly thanks to Trout, the Angels look like they should have the best outfield in the game.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / San Diego / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Most everyone has become comfortable with the fact that Mike Trout (680 PA, 9.0 zWAR) is the world’s best living ballplayer. Merely because one has grown accustomed to his excellence, however, doesn’t preclude one from wanting to have that greatness illustrated periodically. Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections facilitate an opportunity to do that. ZiPS, like other projection systems, is inherently conservative. Despite that, Trout is forecast for nine wins. For reference, consider that, since 2011, a player has reached the nine-win threshold on just six occasions. (On four of those occasions, of course, the player in question was Trout himself.) By definition, a nine-win season is an outlier. Nevertheless, Szymborski’s computer has suggested that as the median outcome for Trout in 2017.

Beyond Trout, unfortunately, there’s little reason for enthusiasm here. Kole Calhoun (620, 3.0) and Andrelton Simmons (574, 3.4) offer some promise. Of the remaining six positions on the club’s offensive depth chart, though, five of them are expected to produce only about a win.

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If you’re an avid FanGraphs reader, you might remember a piece I wrote January in which I wondered whether Vladimir Guerrero had the credentials of a Hall of Famer. The verdict? He does. As an inductee, he wouldn’t have the most impressive resume in the Hall, but he’d belong — and, according to the first 44 ballots collected by Ryan Thibodaux by way of his BBHOF Tracker, it appears as though the voters agree:

At 74%, Guerrero is right on the threshold for induction (which requires a candidate is named on 75% of ballots). That means that even if he isn’t selected this year Guerrero will almost certainly gain entry to the Hall next year. Which is great. Guerrero was a fantastic player. He’s deserving.

Larry Walker was also a great player, though. In most important ways, he was a superior one. And he’s received enough votes on previous Hall of Fame ballots to return for a seventh year. Like the previous six years, however, Walker is unlikely to be enshrined in Cooperstown this year — if the early polling holds steady, that is. In light of Guerrero’s seeming popularity, that’s strange. By most reasonable accounts, Walker has a better case. If you vote for Guerrero, you have to vote for Walker.

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Projected standings in December have little value beyond serving as a conversation starter. By our depth charts, remaining free agents are still projected to accumulate more than 50 WAR this season. Consequently, projected standings will continue to change over the rest of the winter as more signings and trades occur. As I said, though, they’re good conversation starters, and one of the more interesting conversations they’ve started this winter revolves around whether or not the Angels might actually be good in 2017.

As things stand right now, the Angels are projected to go 85-77 and finish second in the AL West behind the Astros. Not only that, but those projected 85 wins represent the fourth-highest projected total in all the American League. Does that mean it’s time to start printing up postseason tickets in Anaheim? Of course not. It’s possible, however — even in the middle of the offseason — to get a sense of current roster strengths and weaknesses from the depth charts that appear here. That’s true of every team.

Take a look at the Angels’ depth chart, for example, and you’ll find that they’re doing A-OK in center field thanks to Mike Trout, but that left field is a bit of a weak spot due to the comparatively limited projected production of Cameron Maybin. That’s certainly a conclusion which passes the sniff test.

However, even the use of projections to diagnose roster weaknesses can be misleading. The Angels’ starting rotation currently profiles to finish almost exactly in the middle of the pack among major-league teams — 16th out of 30 — which would represent a significant improvement for one of the league’s worst rotations of the 2016 season. While noting this potential for improvement, though, it’s important to recognize the unavoidable potential for deception in assigning one clean, round number to projected numbers — numbers, that is, which disguise an inherent degree of uncertainty. If Garrett Richards, Matt Shoemaker, and Tyler Skaggs are healthy and productive then, sure, the team is in good position to field an improved starting rotation. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out at the start of the offseason, however, all three of those pitchers carry significant health question marks.

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