So many good players right now. Let me fluff that up. So many great players right now. For Major League Baseball, it really is a kind of embarrassment of riches. Dave just wrote about Josh Donaldson earlier. He’s great. Kris Bryant? He’s great. Francisco Lindor, Manny Machado, Jose Altuve — all great. These are just great position players, of course. These players, and so many more, deserve all the attention they can get. But still, there’s Mike Trout. The current leader in position-player WAR is Mike Trout. Over the past calendar year, the leader in WAR is Mike Trout. Going forward, the leader in projected WAR is Mike Trout. Mike Trout Mike Trout Mike Trout. It’s hard to believe we ever stop thinking about Mike Trout.

Or maybe it’s not? Everything good in our lives, we take for granted. At least, given enough time. And while Trout isn’t boring, consistency is boring, and since becoming a regular Trout hasn’t posted a wRC+ under 167 or over 176. At some point we all run out of original ways to remind ourselves that Trout is fantastic. His supporting cast doesn’t help. Now it seems like 80% of conversations about Trout concern whether the Angels should trade him.

I can’t speak to the real purpose of Valentine’s Day, but it functions as a day of appreciation. Not that you should require a scheduled push to appreciate your partner, but, again, we take good things for granted, because it’s how we’re programmed. A Mike Trout FanGraphs post is similar. Take a minute. Think about Trout. And, wouldn’t you know it, but the man is evolving. He’s not as static as he seems.

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Tim Lincecum used to be freakishly good. He no longer is. Hampered by hip woes, the 32-year-old right-hander went from winning Cy Young awards and tossing no-hitters to the precipice of pitching oblivion. His velocity down and his ERA up, he succumbed to surgery last September.

He’s on the comeback trail, but not with the team he helped win three World Series. The former Giant signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in May and debuted with his new club in mid-June. His performances have been underwhelming. In four starts, the once-overpowering righty has allowed 29 hits in 18 innings. His fastball is averaging a pedestrian 89 mph.

The extent to which Lincecum can return to his old form remains to be seen. His surgically-repaired hip appears to be holding up, and his damaged psyche is healing as well. He’ll likely never be an elite power pitcher again — or a power pitcher at all — but he feels he can be a productive starter. Only time will tell.

Lincecum talked about his early development as a pitcher, and his career going forward, prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

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Lincecum on pitching: “When you’re younger, you don’t have a plan. You either trust your stuff or you don’t, or you just throw it and hope. I always trusted my stuff. My fastball didn’t always play, but my curveball made my fastball better. That’s what I could execute. Some guys have an idea of how they can pitch — what pitches they should throw in what counts — but guys like me just end up throwing the ball and trusting it. There’s an aspect of that even at this level. You have a plan, but you’re basically throwing the baseball. It all depends on how well you can execute.

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Mike Trout is, once again, the league leader in position-player WAR, and league leaders in position-player WAR tend to do some incredible things. Trout just did an incredible thing on Monday, and we should talk about it. With two strikes, against Collin McHugh:

No, you didn’t see that wrong. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, because memories are notoriously unreliable, but the thing about eyewitnesses is that they witness things once. You can witness this as many times as you want. Loop it over and over and over again. This pitch. It went for a dinger.

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There are a lot of really good Clayton Kershaw fun facts, and he seems to generate countless more every start. He’s the best there is, and the best always produce the best statistics. I think my favorite Kershaw fun fact for now, though, is this: in 2013, he allowed a .521 OPS. In 2014, he allowed a .521 OPS. In 2015, he allowed a .521 OPS. This year, he’s somehow even better, and that doesn’t make any sense, but this year is still going. The fun fact captures the years completed, and it teaches you everything you need to know about Kershaw in a matter of seconds. He’s impossible, and he’s impossibly consistent.

Over the past few weeks, spanning five starts, Matt Shoemaker has allowed a .516 OPS. He’s walked one of 144 batters, while striking out 48. Now, Clayton Kershaw, Matt Shoemaker ain’t. Through the season’s first six starts, Shoemaker had allowed more than a run per inning. He was horrible! Now he’s Kershaw. He’s not really Kershaw, but, it makes you wonder, what’s the significance of looking like Kershaw for such a stretch of time?

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On Monday, I aimed to identify the ideal candidate for the five-man infield, inspired by the radical defensive alignment implemented by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller of the Sonoma Stompers in their new book, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work. I’ve since finished reading the book, and discovered Lindbergh and Miller also deployed the five-man infield’s cousin: the four-man outfield. A follow-up only makes sense.

The Stompers play a four-man outfield against the Pacifics’ Jake Taylor in San Rafael. (Source)

The boxes to check for our five-man infield were this: lots of ground balls, lots of ground ball hits, ground balls sprayed all over the infield, fly balls with predictable tendencies (either extreme pull or extreme oppo).

For our four-man outfield, it’s essentially the inverse. We want all of the following to be true of our batter:

1. He hits a bunch of air balls
2. He sprays those air balls all over the outfield
3. He has very predictable ground-ball tendencies

I didn’t use OPS on fly balls as a box to check because OPS on fly balls includes homers, and those can’t be defended against anyway. Remove homers, and the sample gets real noisy, and to me, it didn’t help us in our search. The hitters we’ve identified ended up being good hitters anyway.

So, the hitter that appeared at the very top of our five-man infield spreadsheet was Howie Kendrick, and he checked every box. Made plenty of sense. He was the only hitter to check every box, and I was a bit surprised there weren’t more. Spoiler alert: I’m not totally convinced by any of our four-man outfield candidates. At least not as convinced as I was about Kendrick. But it’s grounds for some interesting discussion nonetheless!

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Huston Street isn’t an expert on analytics. Nor does he claim to be. But he’s by no means a neophyte. The veteran closer is more knowledgeable about advanced stats than the average player. He also has some strong opinions.

A little over a year ago, Street shared his negative view of FIP in one of my Sunday Notes columns. This past spring, I approached him at the Angels’ spring-training facility, in Tempe, to get his thoughts on shift strategy. I ended up getting a lot more than that. A simple question segued into what might be best described as a stream-of-consciousness look at the state of analytics, in classic Street style.

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Street on defensive shifts: “I’m a big believer in match-ups when it comes to shifts. When they’re done really well, they’re based on the individual match-up and not on a general approach to shifting. Half the league throws 96 and the other half throws 93. Then there’s me, who throws 90.

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We’re doing it. It’s happening again. We’re forgetting about Mike Trout. It’s like collectively, we’re a second-grade teacher with a real-life wizard in our classroom and yet we never call on him or her to be the volunteer for any of the science experiments, so as not to single out the wizard kid while also ensuring that we remain impartial to the other, more normal children, except we know damn well that the normal kids would rather see the wizard kid perform science experiments rather than do it themselves. Call on the wizard kid! Mike Trout is right there!

Y’know how I know we’re forgetting about Mike Trout again? It’s June 1. We’re one-third of the way through the baseball season. Trout has been tagged in exactly one FanGraphs post since Opening Day. It was a post about whether Bryce Harper is better than him. Since that post, Harper’s hit .207 with a 115 wRC+. Trout’s slugged .641 with a 198 wRC+.

For the year, Trout’s been the most valuable position player in baseball. He’s been a top-three bat mixed with a top-three base-runner. He’s seventh in the league in on-base while also ranking among the league’s top-20 power hitters. He’s projected to finish the season with 9.7 WAR (yawn, but it’s not 10), which would give him 47.3 WAR over his first five full major-league seasons. And that’d be the ninth-best five-year peak of any hitter, ever. And Mike Trout is 24.

Even though we, the collective second-grade teacher, don’t call on the wizard kid in class, we’d be lying to ourselves if we said we weren’t curious what he or she were doing at all times. We’re curious what the wizard kid does at recess, we’re curious what the wizard kid eats for lunch, we’re curious what the wizard kid does at home, we’re even curious how the wizard kid gets to school. Broom? Honda Odyssey? Intangibility?

We want up-to-the-minute updates on the developments of wizard kid’s life, so we should want up-to-the-minute updates on the developments of Mike Trout’s game, too. Let’s now briefly discuss five things that are different about Mike Trout.

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Every player, of course, goes through ups and downs, but not every player has the same range between the peaks and the valleys. Take Matt Shoemaker. Just a few weeks ago, there was an argument that he could be the worst starting pitcher in the majors. Even the Angels didn’t know what to do with him, and the Angels are in no position to be picky. Through six starts, Shoemaker had an ERA north of 9, and he’d allowed a slugging percentage close to .600. He looked like the major-league version of the non-prospect he was once considered. He was in over his head. Every at-bat was a nightmare.

Over the last three starts, Shoemaker’s allowed five runs. Better yet, he’s managed 28 strikeouts with just a pair of walks, and two outings in a row now he’s ripped off double-digit whiffs without a single free pass. Since the somewhat arbitrary date of May 12, Shoemaker’s allowed a slugging percentage of .256, a thousandth of a point better than Jake Arrieta. Shoemaker isn’t one of the best pitchers in baseball, and he isn’t one of the worst pitchers in baseball, but he’s looked like both, within a very short time frame. The rebound here has been extreme.

What’s been the key for Shoemaker’s turnaround? Maybe he polished his mechanics. Maybe he’s clearer of head. Maybe almost anything. But there’s certainly one thing that does stand out, which is Shoemaker adopting the Masahiro Tanaka strategy. Tanaka simply doesn’t throw many fastballs. Shoemaker as well has gone with something else.

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Cuban righty Yadier Alvarez was the $16 million crown jewel of the Dodgers’ 2015/2016 international free-agent class. It was the second-highest bonus ever given to an international amateur and reports on Alvarez prior to last July were so good that I ranked him #1 on my J2 board at the time. Alvarez ventured stateside this spring and has consistently pitched every fifth day, only missing one start to attend the birth of his child. Reports coming out of Camelback Ranch have been superlative. On Monday, I got to see it for myself along with a number of other interesting prospects.

Yadier Alvarez, RHP, Los Angeles Dodgers

Current Level: Extended Spring Training, Age: 20.2, Height/Weight: 6’3/180
Signed: IFA at age 19 on July 2, 2015 out of Cuba by LA for $16.0 million bonus

Alvarez was electric. After opening his start with a few fringe fastballs, he began to loosen up and was sitting 92-97 before long. He has been up to 100 this spring, which is especially notable given that there were rumors over the offseason that his velocity had been down. Mixed in along with the fastball was an 82-86 mph slider with late, two-plane bite. It flashed plus, but the line between that pitch and his 76-82 mph curveball was sometimes blurry. The curveball is a bit more vertically oriented than the slider and Alvarez decelerates his arm a bit to throw it, but it flashed average and it should solidify there once he becomes more comfortable with its release.

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For the last week or so, the Angels have been pretty vague about what’s going on with Garrett Richards. He missed a start due to “fatigue” and “dehydration”, but they hadn’t given any real indicators that his arm was bothering him. Apparently it was, however, as Jeff Passan dropped this bomb this morning.

Source: Angels ace Garrett Richards has torn ulnar collateral ligament and is expected to need Tommy John surgery. https://t.co/wkbiUpTCl0

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) May 6, 2016

This is a huge blow to the Angels, not only because Richards is really good, but because the Angels pitching staff without him is atrocious. Here’s what our current depth chart forecast for Anaheim’s starting rotation looks like, with Richards included.

#25 Angels

Name	IP	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	BABIP	LOB%	ERA	FIP	WAR
Garrett Richards	159.0	8.4	3.2	0.7	.298	72.7 %	3.39	3.41	2.8
Hector Santiago	140.0	8.1	3.5	1.1	.292	74.2 %	3.89	4.29	1.3
Jered Weaver	137.0	5.6	2.5	1.4	.288	70.0 %	4.54	4.84	0.5
Nicholas Tropeano	114.0	8.5	3.3	1.1	.303	71.6 %	4.09	4.03	1.1
Matt Shoemaker	84.0	7.6	2.3	1.2	.298	71.5 %	4.04	4.07	0.9
Andrew Heaney	62.0	7.5	2.6	1.0	.301	72.0 %	3.83	3.91	0.7
C.J. Wilson	40.0	7.6	3.7	0.9	.295	70.8 %	4.06	4.14	0.4
Tyler Skaggs	39.0	8.7	3.2	0.8	.294	73.7 %	3.42	3.60	0.6
Kyle Kendrick	16.0	5.3	2.3	1.2	.292	71.5 %	4.23	4.59	0.1
Total	790.0	7.6	3.0	1.1	.296	72.1 %	3.93	4.08	8.4

Hector Santiago is a FIP-beater, so he’s better than that projected WAR makes him look, but after him, it’s a dumpster fire. And in Passan’s story, he notes that Andrew Heaney may also need Tommy John surgery, so we might be crossing his ~60 innings off that list as well, if his rehab-to-avoid-surgery plan isn’t successful. And Tyler Skaggs just went for an MRI after getting scratched from a Triple-A start last week; the current diagnosis is biceps tendonitis, but it’s an arm problem for a guy with a history of arm problems.

At some point in the not too distant future, the Angels rotation could be Santiago-Weaver-Tropeano-Shoemaker-Kendrick, which wouldn’t be good enough to contend even if supported by the offense of the 1927 Yankees. And the 2016 Angels aren’t exactly an offensive behemoth.

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