Down With the King

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