Getting Mike Trout to a 15-WAR Season
The baseball world suffered a brief moment of shock on Tuesday night. Mike Trout, who needs no introduction within this interrupting clause to emphasize his greatness, was replaced by Peter Bourjos in the fourth inning of the Angels-Brewers game. Afterwards, Trout was diagnosed with a mild groin strain, and baseball collectively breathed a large sigh of relief. It appears that he plans to miss just a single game with the injury.
Before Trout exited on Tuesday, however, he had already gone 2-for-2 at the plate, adding yet another game to his hot start; in 49 plate appearances this season, Trout is slashing .406/.592/.938. Even in a brief outing, his WAR total still managed to increase, moving from 1.2 to 1.3. As of Wednesday, he is tied with Cody Bellinger for the major league lead in WAR rounded to one decimal place.
As we all know, Trout is the WAR king. He’s already put up 66.2 WAR in his career, making him the most valuable player in baseball since 2006, even though his career didn’t even start until 2011 and his first full season didn’t even come until 2012. I could go on and on about how great Mike Trout is at producing WAR, but a lot of those articles have already been written here and at other places.
One article that did catch my attention, however, was this 2015 piece from August Fagerstrom titled “Getting Mike Trout to 168.4 WAR.” In this piece, Fagerstrom outlined a potential career curve for Trout to hit 168.4 total WAR, a mark that would tie him with Babe Ruth for the most WAR produced by a single player in baseball history.
In this piece, I plan to do something similar but different. As in Fagerstrom’s piece, I want Trout to tie Ruth, but on a different WAR leaderboard: the all-time single-season mark.
In 1923, Ruth hit .393/.545/.764 (231 wRC+) with 41 home runs, 170 walks, and just 93 strikeouts over 699 plate appearances. He produced 15.0 WAR. That’s not a typo. It’s not the greatest offensive season of all time — that distinction belongs to Barry Bonds’ 2002 campaign, when he posted a 244 wRC+ — but it’s still pretty close. Plus, at least by our WAR model, Ruth graded out as a very solid defender that year too, posting 12.6 runs above-average with the glove.
So, it’s now time for me to ask the central question of this piece: What numbers would Mike Trout have to put up to produce 15.0 WAR in a season? With no disrespect to Bellinger, who also has 1.3 WAR this year, Trout is the only player in baseball who could even potentially sniff a 15-win season. Yes, he is currently “on pace” for 17.6 WAR, but since his career high is “only” 10.2 WAR, Trout would need to have a massive improvement this year in order to even come close.
The answer to this question is not as complicated as you may think it is. In fact, I am able to come to a pretty concrete answer, just through reverse-engineering our WAR formula. For those unfamiliar about how WAR is calculated, it’s broken into six main components: Batting Runs, Base Running Runs, Fielding Runs, Positional Adjustment, League Adjustment, and Replacement Runs. On our leaderboards, we combine Batting and Base Running Runs to produce an “Offensive Runs” total; likewise, for defense, we combine Fielding Runs and Positional Adjustment to produce a “Defensive Runs” total. When calculating WAR, you sum those six components to determine how many runs a player is worth, and then, you divide them by the runs per win factor (something that changes on a year-to-year basis) to get a player’s WAR.
To demonstrate this idea, Trout produced 9.8 WAR last year. He was worth 66.1 Batting Runs, 5.0 Base Running Runs, and 4.0 Fielding Runs. Summing those numbers with his Positional Adjustment (0.2), League Adjustment (1.9), and the Replacement Runs (18.2) gets you to a total of 95.4 Runs Above Replacement (RAR). Divide that by 9.714, the 2018 runs per win constant, and congratulations, you have calculated Trout’s 9.8 WAR!
Using this same concept, we can calculate what Trout would need to do in order to produce 15.0 WAR over the course of the 2019 season.
First, we have to convert the 15.0 WAR total to RAR. The 2019 runs per win constant is 10.150, though this will continue to fluctuate throughout the rest of the season. Using this constant, we find that Trout would need to produce a total of 152.25 RAR. He would need to improve his career-high 96.3 RAR (set in 2012) by 58% to do so. That doesn’t sound easy.
Unfortunately for Trout, some of his RAR is outside of his control. His Positional Adjustment is his Positional Adjustment. The same goes for his League and Replacement Level adjustments. These figures fluctuate from year-to-year, but let’s assume that Trout will play an entire, 155-game, 650-plate appearance season in center field. I’m factoring in seven games off because it’s rare to play 162, and we already know that Trout will miss at least one game due to his injury. Nonetheless, he’ll still need a lot of playing time to catch Ruth.
Based on the calculations for Positional Adjustment, League Adjustment, and Replacement Level Adjustment, this means that Trout would receive about 2.4 runs, 1.7 runs, and 20.3 runs from each of these components, respectively. Unfortunately for him, these factors are, for the most part, outside of his control. On the bright side, Trout hasn’t done a single thing on a baseball field in this scenario, and he has accumulated 24.4 of the 152.25 RAR he needs to hit the 15.0 WAR mark. We’re 16% of the way there.
Moving on, let’s talk about defense. This can be a little bit tricky. For the general baseball fan, it’s not always easy to see a player’s defensive contributions in the same light as their offensive ones. That’s why, at least for me, it’s hard, even in this scenario, to think that Trout will become the Andrelton Simmons of the outfield and start to rack up a ton of Defensive Runs. So, for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that Trout manages to post 25 runs in center field. This might be a bit of a stretch, but, to be fair, this entire article is a stretch. Trout would need to have a historic season in center, and it’s not like 25 Fielding Runs has never been done before; in fact, 2011 Brett Gardner posted a massive 26.7 fielding runs in the outfield. This brings our total up to 49.4 RAR.
Additionally, Trout isn’t known to be a burner on the bases lately, but he did manage to post 14.3 Base Running Runs in 2012, the highest mark among outfielders since 2010. Trout certainly doesn’t run as well as he did then, so let’s say he puts up 10 more this season, bringing our total RAR up to 59.4, still 92.85 RAR shy of the mark necessary to hit the legendary total.
The rest of Trout’s value, then, must come from his bat. That won’t be easy, but is it even doable? Let’s take a look. Batting Runs is somewhat of a complicated formula, but, like with the rest, we can reverse engineer it to get exactly the 92.85 RAR that we need. Batting Runs is pretty much just a park- and league-adjusted version of Weighted Runs Above Average (wRAA), which is really just a volume-adjusted wOBA, but, alas, we must calculate all of this out. So, in order to accumulate the remaining 92.85 RAR that Trout needs, he’d have to produce a total of 87.38 wRAA. This paragraph was kind of a snooze-fest, huh?
This is where the offensive value gets interesting. Knowing that Trout needs to produce 87.38 wRAA, we can convert this back to wOBA, a more accessible statistic that will tell us just about how well Trout will need to hit. The conversion from wRAA to wOBA is: wRAA = ((wOBA – lgwOBA)/wOBA Scale) * PA. Using basic algebra, we find that Trout needs to post a .4791 wOBA over 650 plate appearances to produce the wRAA he needs to put up the 92.85 offensive RAR necessary to hit 15.0 WAR.
Could Trout ever post a full-season wOBA of .4791 or higher? Since 2000, only one player has ever posted a wOBA that high: Barry Bonds, who posted a wOBA over .500 in each season from 2001 to 2004. But because Bonds was not exceptional on the bases or on defense at this point in his career, he only topped out at 12.7 WAR at any point in those four seasons, with that mark coming in 2002.
The first player on the single-season wOBA leaderboard in this timespan not named Barry Bonds is Manny Ramirez, who, in slashing .351/.457/.697 over the course of 532 plate appearances, posted a .477 wOBA in his 2000 campaign. Trout would have to hit something in that realm — in the ballpark of a 1.150 OPS or higher — to even have a shot.
But, if we were to limit the scope of that data to 2010-present, the highest single-season wOBA was Bryce Harper’s .461 mark in 2015. He slashed .330/.460/.649 that year but still finished 18 points shy of what I’ve deemed to be the “magic number” in this scenario.
| Batting Runs | BsR | Fielding Runs | Positional Adj. | League Adj. | Replacement | RAR | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 92.8 | 10.0 | 25.0 | 2.4 | 1.7 | 20.3 | 152.2 | 15.0 |
As I’ve said all along, the odds that Mike Trout puts up a 15.0 WAR season are slim. In fact, they’re probably close to zero. This assumes that Trout puts up career years in every facet of his game; it’s hard to expect something like this to happen in actuality, but as always, this whole exercise was supposed to be just a fun experiment, and Trout has a way of surprising.
Let’s just hope that Trout gets well soon; it sure would be fun to watch him attempt to chase a 15.0 WAR season.
Devan Fink is a Contributor at FanGraphs. You can follow him on Twitter @DevanFink.
The positional value of CF is a lower modifier than I thought. What are the other positions worth?
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/explaining-win-values-part-three/
Catcher: +12.5 runs (all are per 162 defensive games)
First Base: -12.5 runs
Second Base: +2.5 runs
Third Base: +2.5 runs
Shortstop: +7.5 runs
Left Field: -7.5 runs
Center Field: +2.5 runs
Right Field: -7.5 runs
Designated Hitter: -17.5 runs
Wow Chapman is REALLY REALLY good at third then
Best defender. Ever. At any position.
Can a 3b really be the best defender ever? Chapman is amazing but IMO just like relievers are failed starters imo third basemen are failed shortstops. There are probably shortstops who would be better at third base then him but they don’t play third because they can handle SS.
Of course 3b has its own challenges too but if you look at guys who do both they are all much better at third. Machado is amazing at third and barely average at short for example.
The same is true for corner OFs. If you look at guys putting up insane defensive runs numbers like eaton they become pretty average when they play in center.
Chapman no doubt is a great defender but I have a hard time calling a corner guy the best defender in the game whether it is a corner IF or OF.
I mean Heyward and eaton are amazing corner OFs but barely average in center. Imagine buxton or kiermeier in rightfield, their numbers would be off the charts. Likewise imagine Simmons or lindor playing third, again insane numbers after some adjustment period.
That’s the same thing I was thinking while reading the values. I would expect it to be something like SS>CF>2B>3B.
If Trout reaches 15 WAR in today’s competition, it’s much more impressive to me.
Players are getting better and better, and the competition is getting tighter and tighter. You’d expect the standard deviation of performance to shrink from when Ruth played to the current era of Trout.
This means that it’s more likely for an extreme outlier like Ruth to occur — the distribution of talent is just wider. And due to the nature of how WAR is calculated, it was easier to rack up more WAR in Ruth’s days.
So how do we better compare players across different eras? Is Ruth’s season even the target to beat? How close is Trout already?
OTOH, Ruth had fewer games to accomplish this in. (And his defensive metrics are quit suspect).
Why do we assume that players are getting better and better?
Lets look at Olympic events… which direction have typical high-end times been going? This is rhetorical, they’ve been pretty universally getting better, so is it a stretch to say that the most elite baseball players today are better than those in the past? I don’t think so.
Ummm…No. Lets look at the world records in track and field. The majority of the women’s world records in the major events were set in the 1980’s to early 2000’s. No women today are remotely challenging the world records in the 100m (1988) , 200 m (1988) 400m (1985), 800m (1983), and the marathon (2003). The women’s 800 m world record was set in 1983. The second fastest time was run in 1980.
Also, Olympic events are not baseball. Baseball is not a measure of pure human physical performance. It’s a game played with a large group of people working in tandem. If players today are better than why is major league hitting so piss poor? Strategy is also a major factor in how a game is played. The stolen base is pretty gone. Pitchers are pitching less and less. Why is that if they are “better”?
My point is that it’s not so easy to point to other sports and say baseball is “better” now. We simply don’t have a reliable way to measure “better” across baseball era to make any strong assertions.
Adam, drug testing changed since then. That is the only reason for womens records.
Don’t do the whole get off my lawn thing. Babe Ruth might go 20-600 with 450ks vs Ottavino. The league is hitting piss poor because the pitchers are that much better. Hall of famers from the past wouldn’t even sniff the MLB today. Do you think Hank Aaron could hit current MLB pitching? Go back and watch some of those guys swings.
You really believe that track athletes are not using drugs today? LOL. Google “thyroid therapy”. It has nothing to do with “get of my lawn”. I didn’t say the players in the past were necessarily better. But I don’t have this mentality that everything just gets “better” over time. A 5’4″ Jose Altuve can dominate in the majors today but Ruth couldn’t hit a lick today? At all? You are just assuming that pitchers are “better” because the hitting is poor. But that is simply a circular argument. Is the poor hitting caused by better pitching or do the pitchers look” better” because the hitters can’t hit as well or are using hitting approaches that don’t work? There are lots of players today who couldn’t play in the past. Take any three-true outcomes hitter who is slow with bad defense. Stick him in the Dead Ball era or the 1920’s or the 1940’s. There is no DH so he’d have to play the field. He’d have to cover much more ground in the much larger ball parks of the past using those tiny primitive gloves. He would have no batting helmet and play all day games in stifling heat and humidity. He’d have no access to modern medicine or weight training. I’ve seen plenty of swings of the older players. Some would adapt today and some wouldn’t. Ted Williams couldn’t hit today? But the game today is not the best ever IMO. Whenever one side of the ball starts to dominate that is a sign of a competitive imbalance and stronger indicator of relatively poor quality. And, yes, I do believe Hank Aaron in his prime could hit well today.
Altuve would hit be the all time home run leader.
Besides all of the obvious factors like nutrition, weight training, pitch velocity, spin rates, technology, the whole god damn unbanning of players of color, advanced scouting, the lure of fame and money, player development system that prepares these guys from birth etc etc etc, you only need to look at one stat.
Pitchers, who are chosen for their ability to pitch, have had their WRC+ drop tremendously over time. The league average WRC+ is 100. Pitchers in 2018 were -25. Negative! The pitcher average from 2000-2018 was -13. Pitchers were around 50 wrc+ in 1900.
Here is a link to a chart from sbnation in 2013:
Did not expect the chart to actually appear in the comment, that’s cool!
On a year-by-year basis, the best we can do is analogize to other sports where the baseline talent level is easier to quantify and employ common sense. Every year, baseball players have more information, either from an analytics standpoint, a sports nutrition standpoint or a training standpoint, to make themselves better. Thousands of dudes who are really good at baseball work their asses off to reach the highest level in a near-zero sum game. If you’re not one of the 750 best, you don’t get one of the 750 spots at the one level (in this country) where it pays to play the game. So they use that information, and they work even harder or in more specific and efficient ways, and they become better.
If you’re not going year-by-year but rather across eras, it’s even simpler. The Cuba deal’s scuttling is a setback, but with the massive influx of Cubans over the past 6-7 years (pretty much depleting all of the impact talent on the island except the very youngest and very oldest guys), coupled with renewed willingness to look not only at Japan but also at the Korean and Taiwanese professional leagues, MLB’s never in its history been closer to being the one global repository of the world’s best talent.
That means more players, from more sources, which means it’s even harder to be one of the 750 best, which mean the 750 best are, on average, likely to be better than they were.
Except the talent pool in American has been shrinking for a long time, despite the larger population. Kids today have so many more options for activities from other sports to to video games, Internet, etc. I’ll give an example that I have seen. I played Little League baseball in 1979-81, My home town had a population just over 20K in 1980 according to the US Census. At that time my town had three Little Leagues. Each had three levels of play (majors, minors, farm). Each level has six teams. That’s 54 teams for a population of 20K. In the early 2000’s two of the leagues were forced to merge due to lack of kids playing. Today they only have about 40 teams even though my town now has a population of just over 54K (2017). In 1980 a 20K population supported 54 teams but in 2017 a 54K population can only support 40 teams? Now apply this to the entirety of America. I have a friend that has been involved in youth baseball for over 40 years and he told me that over the past 20 years or so the percentage of youth playing baseball has dropped tremendously. How many great ballplayers have been lost simply because they never even played baseball?
If only we could somehow expand this theoretical pool of players from beyond our own country…
You mean like the Japanese and Korean position players who have been a bust as whole in the majors? Other than Ichiro and Matsui what have the the Asian position players done? The pitchers have been more successful.
Shin Soo Choo has certainly had a fine career, and Nori Aoki has as well. Many of these guys are hurt by the fact that they don’t come stateside until well into their career.
Latin America? Remember back when Ruth played there were no African Americans or Latin American players in the league.
I heard that Ohtani kid is pretty good.
To suggest that players aren’t getting better is nothing short of romanticizing the past. Our understanding of the body, sports science, nutrition science, and other ways of optimizing the physical condition is so far beyond what it was in the past. Players now are undoubtedly stronger, faster, and more athletic than ever before. The advances in our understanding of baseball are even more vast. Pitchers are throwing far harder than ever before, and say whatever you will about command but like it or not velocity correlated to success and is harder to hit. We now live in an age where pitchers can design the spin axis on their pitches to the optimal angle. Analytics can pick out each player’s strengths and weaknesses and these weaknesses can be targeted in the games. Players can better optimize their skills than ever before
Also, your argument about how pitchers throw less and less because they aren’t better is a completely atrocious and illogical argument. Pitchers throw less because hitters as a whole are fairly good at figuring out all but the best pitchers the third time they see them. Pitchers’ success and ability to pitch more is due to the gap between pitchers and hitters (pitchers will forever be ahead of the hitters) and not raw skill. And even though pitchers are throwing harder than ever with nastier off speed, attacking the hitters’ weak spots with data driven scouting reports, hitters have still managed to hit and close the gap between pitchers and hitters. There is no doubt baseball players as a whole are better now than they used to be.
It isnt romanticizing the past, it is understanding that the arguments you make are not as simple as you make them out to be. It may be true that past players are universally worse, but is also is quite likely that is not true, and there is even a good chance that at least many top players from the past would still be dominant players today. Lets examine some of the points you make.
First of all, athleticism. You claim it is undoubtedly true that the athletes in baseball are better than the past. Athleticism is absolutely improving over time in an objective sense, so on the surface this argument has significant merit.
However, does being a better athlete make you an objectively better baseball player? The argument you are making is basically the athletes of today could go back and play in MLB based on athleticism alone, with no need for exceptional skill. Is this true? If only we had some way to test this.
Of course you have surmised that I do have a way to test this, and it is more than just some hand waving and conjectures like presented in your argument. What if we had someone, a generational athlete, who has known and measured athletic accomplishments, who also played major league baseball? We do have that: Jim Thorpe.
As an Olympic champion, we are aware that Thorpe was an incredible runner for his day. In fact, his 10 flat 100 yard dash time is still a very solid time today. It would not sniff Bolt, or even the college championships, but in terms of baseball athleticism, how good would it be?
Harrison Bader, who was 7th in MLB has the same sprint speed as Thorpe. Actually, Bader has a peak velocity that is the same as the average Thorpe put up, but just to account for potentially substandard stopwatches and other measuring, lets assume that Thorpe got a little help (even though that is unlikely).
Great, so we have someone who has modern athleticism as a baseline for how that stacks up in baseball. Thorpe would not only be athletically comparable to the athletes of today, but he would be a top level athlete in modern baseball.
Granted, that doesnt mean that he would be a great player (he wasnt a great player in his day either, which is the crux of this argument, upcoming), arguably the best athlete is Byron Buxton, who even though he has a world of talent, has not yet put it together into baseball skill.
The point is, that having top shelf athleticism does not guarantee baseball success at the major league level. It helps, but baseball is still primarily a skills based game. Mike Trout, unquestionably the best player today, athletically would be below average in the NBA, or a good but not great D1 RB/FB in football. His 40 yard dash numbers are about 4.5, and he is 230 pounds. Those guys come out every year.
Conceptually, we agree that athleticism has improved over time. We also agree that the average major league player is likely a better athlete than in the past. Where we disagree is how much better that makes a baseball player. My contention is that the skills are much more important than the athleticism, and that is borne out by data we have for elite athletes then and now.
Now to pitching. Velocity is up. Average velocity is up. Velocity has also changed how it is measured, now we measure true maximum, out of the hand, as opposed to velocity at home plate. If you watched Fastball, you know that Nolan Ryan likely threw harder than anyone today. It isnt hard to believe even anecdotally, when you understand that at 46 his last professional pitch was a 98 mph fastball, and velocity peaks quite early.
The issue is the statement you have regarding velocity being correlated with success. This is a lot like your athleticism statement. Its true on the surface, but it doesnt address the actual issue you are arguing against. Fastball velocity is way up, but players actually hit velocity better than movement. Curves have higher whiff rates than fastballs, and basically always have.
There are many arguments to be made here regarding velocity delta between pitches, location, etc. Like above, there are data points here but nothing that is conclusive.
Pitchers throw harder now, but batters handle velocity. Pitchers throw to a larger strike zone now. The parks are smaller, significantly. Equipment is better, balls are used for fewer pitches. No one throws inside now. Protective equipment makes staying in versus pitching less of a risk.
Those things above are not an exhaustive list, but they all affect the quality of pitching, and hitting versus pitching. It is impossible to know how much each of them matters in the full scheme.
The main point is this. Modern baseball players are amazing, and we are very fortunate to be able to watch them play. This does not mean that past players were any less amazing. They were different. We know they were different. They did some things better, they did some things worse.
It is impossible to know if prior eras were significantly worse. There are reasonable arguments, science and stats based arguments, that older players were pretty amazing in their own right. It is certainly legitimate to believe modern players are better than past players. It is not, however, some kind of objective fact that makes any disagreement some kind of delusion.
I’m not saying that just having athleticism makes you a good baseball player, that’s not my argument. My argument is that if we keep everything else equal, increasing the players’ athleticism will make them better players. A player who can run twice as fast as another will be better than the other if they have the same other skills. Increasing the athleticism of every modern player over their older counterparts makes them better.
Additionally, your argument is ridiculously flawed. You’re talking about specific players; when we’re talking about the players as a whole that’s not an effective argument. One physical outlier like Nolan Ryan doesn’t change the fact that on average pitchers throw harder and are better.
You say that skills make players better, and this is definitely true. However, why would we not say modern baseball players are more skilled? Velocity being up is one easy argument to show the progression of ability, but are you suggesting that players do not have better off speed now as well? Pitchers have now designed their off speed to optimize spin rate and efficiency at facilities like driveline, and can use data and technology to improve their off speed as well. Our knowledge of tunneling has taken off in recent years, and this skill has helped pitchers become better and strike out more players.
Additionally, any player can go online and start learning fundamentals from a professional at a young age, would this not help their skills and fundamentals? Information makes players better, and it is now more available than ever.
Finally, I don’t get your equipment argument at all. Making the ballparks smaller helps the hitters, but not the pitchers. Increasing the strike zone size helps the pitchers but not the hitters. Each of these changes makes it harder for one group to succeed, and thus makes their continued success require more skill. There’s no reason equipment or other changes means players are not better now then they were before when you actually consider the full ramifications of the change.
My arguments are not as simple as I presented them to be because I’m writing it in a comments section and trying to capture the overall idea. But I would say the exact same about your deeply flawed response, your counter arguments are flimsy at best
There are no unskilled players in the majors. They’re all the best player on the best team they ever grew up playing on. So, knowing that everyone in MLB is already a skilled baseball player, improving what happens when they throw a ball or swing a bat through nutrition, strength training, or math makes them better baseball players.
Here are the means and SD of WAR for 1923, 2002, and 2018:
1923: Mean WAR = 2.9, SD = 2.6
2002: Mean WAR = 3.0, SD = 2.3
2018: Mean WAR = 2.9, SD = 2.1
Thus, the variance in WAR is currently lower than in Ruth’s big season, but it is not massively different.
That difference means 15 WAR was 4.6 standard deviations above the mean in 1923 but would be 5.7 standard deviations above the mean in 2018. That’s (very very roughly) the difference between a one-in-100,000 outlier and a one-in100,000,000 outlier. So a 15 WAR season was 1,000 times more likely to happen in 1923. Unless my math is wrong, which happens.
That is a bit misleading though, because the 15 WAR in 1923 actually happened and is part of the dataset that is used to estimate the shape of the distribution. Ruth is a massive outlier in 1923. If you take Ruth out of the sample, the SD goes all the way down to 2.2. In other words, Ruth is driving the increased variation all by himself.
Similarly, taking Barry Bonds out of the 2002 data changes the SD from 2.3 to 2.1.
So, without the crazy Ruth and Bonds outliers, the environments for variation in WAR don’t actually look all that different.
Interesting. What if you take Trout out of 2018?
If you take Trout out of 2018 the SD goes down to 2.0.
…and, just for fun, if you take Chris Davis out of 2018 the SD goes down to 2.05.
Interesting point. In general, removing outliers before calculating standard deviation kind of defeats the purpose, but I see what you’re getting at.
Never gonna happen. Ruth is the only player to have a 13 WAR season, let alone 15…he’s a massive outlier in a very different time, playing in a very different league (half the teams, no black players, few relief pitchers, etc). The nature of the game is that statistical outliers become less common over the decades, with fewer very high WAR seasons. Other than Barry Bonds in 2001-04, you have to go back to Joe Morgan in 1975 to find an 11 WAR hitting season. Or consider:
1907-32 (26 years): 14 11+ WAR position player seasons (Ruth x6, Hornsby x3, Cobb x2, Wagner, Gehrig, Foxx)
1933-2018 (86 years): 11 11+ WAR position player seasons (Bonds x3, Williams x3, Mantle x2, Musial, Morgan, Yaz)
Can Trout produce 11 WAR? I think he can. He just needs to be slightly better than last year, but play more games. Last year he was at 9.8 in 140 games, which is a pace of 11.3 in 162 games.
So I think if he doesn’t miss substantial time, he has a very good shot at 11 WAR. If he is healthy AND takes a solid step forward, with a 200+ wRC+ and has a good defensive year, then 12 WAR is a distinct possibility. Consider his wRC+ over the last three years: 170, 181, 191. Further improvement seems at least possible, even if he doesn’t reach that hallowed 200 mark.
On a side note, I just did some calculations and figured out that Trout has the second highest WAR/162 games played in baseball history at 10.0, behind only Ruth at 10.9. Next up is Hornsby at 9.3. I’d love to see some kind of WAR/year stat added to the leaderboards.
I’d say more “extremely, infinitesimally unlikely” than “never gonna happen” (at least, if the “never gonna happen” is intended to say no player will ever get there and not just that Trout won’t).
This article shows that if someone could hit like Bonds and field like Anduw Jones in his prime, he could get to 15.
Trout’s almost certainly not that guy. There’s some tiny chance he could put up a season with a .500+ wOBA, but he’s not suddenly going to turn into Andruw Jonesin the field in his late-20s.
But that guy could be out there, at some point in the future. It’s not IMpossible.
Trout and Betts were both on pace for 11 WAR last year if they hadn’t missed > 20 games with injuries. And speaking of Betts, I’m surprised the author doesn’t mention him, since he;s actually capable of putting up monster defensive numbers, as well as stealing bases.
If Mookie were projected to 155 games last year (instead of 136), he would be at 11.85 WAR.
Baseball is 6 months long, which means Trout would need to avg 2.5 fWAR per month to accomplish this. In 2018, here are the list of players that did this each month:
Mar/April: None (betts led with 2.1 fWAR, Trout with 1.9)
May: two players did it (Lindor 2.6 and Trout at 2.5)
June: None (Goldy led with 2, Trout was at 1.9)
July: None(J Ramirez led with 2.1, Trout was at 1.6)
August: None (J Turner led with 2.2, Trout at 0.3 due to injury)
September Yelich with 2.5, Trout with 1.7
15 fWAR seems impossible even for Trout
Well done! Thanks for this ^^
Puts it into much better perspective!
Wait did you just say that Babe Ruth graded out as a pretty good defender in a season 96 years ago?
Contemporary accounts show Ruth was considered a very good defensive player in his 20’s.
Derek Jeter and Nick Markakis each won multiple gold gloves. If we can’t trust modern baseball writers’ accounts of defense, I sure don’t trust 1920s accounts of it.
Do you have any reason to believe that Ruth wasn’t a good defensive outfielder?
I have a hard time buying that Babe Ruth put up that great of a season defensively. Heck, I’m skeptical of just about any defensive stats more than a few years old. In Ruth’s case though, his 1923 defensive numbers are an outlier for even him. His best year before 1923 was 1.5. He had one other year after (4 years later) at 5.5. Outside of those two outliers, his best defensive total was 2.8 runs. So yeah, 12.6 runs doesn’t seem likely.
Of course, I didn’t see Ruth play but there are some contemporary players that I did see that simply doesn’t pass the sniff test. My favorite is Bonds in 2003. The guy is 39 YO’s playing a corner outfield position (with the associated penalty for being a RF’er). Somehow he puts up a 5.6 defensive run mark. By then, it hurt just to watch the guy take a free base or trot around the diamond after knocking another HR. Bonds at 39 basically generated more defensive value than Trout in all but 2 of Trout’s 8 seasons.
I’m calling bull crap on that.
He also was the best pitcher, stole a lot of bases, and hit nearly 400 versus butchers, and factory workers.
For a high school kid, you are really something. Tell your parents congrats.
The best thing about that “getting trout to 168.4 WAR” article is that in that article they have him accruing 9.2, 7.7, and 8.8 WAR in ’16, ’17 and ’18, which totals 25.7 WAR. In reality, he total 26.4 WAR. So he is 0.7 WAR over pace. He obviously needs to put up Herculean numbers moving forward still to even sniff 168, but he is on pace
He’d have to hit like a junior Vogelbach.
1-5 with a game winning bomb and his wRC+ drops nearly 100 points. Bad day. He will rebound tomorrow.
He’s clearly turned a corner this year. His swing is more compact, quicker to the ball and just as explosive on contact. Im not sure where he’ll end up but Im sure this will be his best offensive year on a rate basis. Teams are already starting to pitch around him most of the time up.
Assuming 650 plate appearances is silly – he’s twice had over 700 in a season, and if he were to approach 15 WAR, it would almost certainly happen in a season where he gets lots of playing time.
Yeah. If you are going for a 15 WAR season, you should really have extreme assumptions.
10 baserunning runs is also way too modest compared to an appropriately ambitious 25 fielding runs.
The real question is what would it take for Dan Vogelbach to produce 15 WAR.
I tried a different tack:
First, we’ll give him 10 base-running runs. He’s done better, but we won’t be greedy. He hit 9.6 just a few years ago, so in a world-historic career year, 10 seems fair.
Next, we’ll give him 10.4 fielding runs, matching his career best.
Which leaves offense. I’ve given him fewer fielding runs than Devan did, so we have a bigger hill here, but I’m going to tackle it a different way. Rather than looking at other players to see how high we can push Trout’s wOBA, we’ll look at Trout’s own history and extrapolate out a career year for him.
We’ll start by giving him 700 PAs. He’s done it before, and if he’s gonna beat the Babe, he’ll have to do it again.
Trout’s career-best walk rate was last year’s 20%, so we’ll have him match that, giving him 141 walks. To calculate wOBA, though, we’ll also need to know how many of those were intentional. Last year, 20% of Trout’s walks were intentional; let’s bump that up to 25% as he starts to get the Bonds treatment, giving him 35 IBB.
Next, we’ll give him 5 sacrifice flies, 0 sac bunts, and 10 HBP, which is basically what he’s done each year for the past 4 years.
And now, finally, the fun stuff. What we need to figure out is how many hits he’s going to get and how they’ll be apportioned among the various hit types. We’ll do this first by taking his career-best batting average, which is .326, and bumping it up by 10%, to .359. This gives him 195 hits. To apportion them, we’re going to find his career-best rates for doubles, triples, and HRs (e.g., HR/H) and again bump each one by 10%, after which he ends up with 52 HR, 10 3B, and 44 2B. Which means the remaining 89 hits were singles.
Now we just do a bit of math, and we end up with a .359/.494/.763 slash line, a .496 wOBA, and, drum roll please … 15.12 WAR.
And all we needed to do was bump a few of his career-best marks by 10%.
That… when you break it down that way, it somehow seems more plausible. I mean, if I woke up from a coma in October and somebody told me Mike Trout had batted .360 with 50+ HR, I’d believe them.
Yeah, I think it’s weird to limit his offense to comparisons to inferior hitters (which is currently everyone in baseball). The path to 15 WAR is pretty obvious, if unlikely to all happen at once. Stay very healthy (not looking good), play CF (check), be above average baserunner (check), be above average in CF (plausible), and hit like peak-all-time-great (plausible). Bonds made it to 244 (wRC+) and over 200 four times, Williams peaked at 223 and bested 200 6 or 7 times. Mantle peaked at 217, over 200 twice. Trout’s career wrc is currently 172, and based on the past 3 years he’s working with a baseline of ~.310/.450/.600. Having a few years at .360/.490/.760 wouldn’t be the most shocking thing to ever happen.
Another way to get Trout to 15 WAR: Make a mental adjustment to reflect the skill of a replacement player in Trout’s MLB vs. than in Ruth’s all-white, all-American league.
I enjoyed this, and I appreciate your work.
But why start off with such a fanciful defensive ask?
I get that the whole exercise is how to top Trout’s best season value by about half, so pretty much every component target must be eye-popping. But at least age 27 is ripe for a batting surge. Not so on defense, for a CF with a well established level. There’s a much better chance of Trout having a historic year at bat than in the field. The exercise would be more interesting to me with a more gettable (but still lofty) target of 15 defensive runs.
Getting granular …
Gardner’s monster 2011 was basically a repeat of his prior year. For Trout, such a number would more than double his prior high, and that was his first full year; his subsequent years averaged less than 1 run. Gardner also had better speed indicators.
A quick rundown of the top guys on that Gardner list you linked to:
— Gardner, 26.7 age 27 and 24.8 age 26: His age 24-25 were actually better, on a rate basis.
— Andres Torres, 21.7 age 32: Outlier by age, yet his prior year had a better rate, and his home park (SF) was an opportunity haven for a speedy CF/RF.
— Mookie Betts, 21.5 age 24 and 21.1 age 23: Yes, his age 23 was a leap from his one prior full year, but it also came with a shift from CF to RF, plus one full year doesn’t establish a true level.
— Michael Bourn, 19.8, age 27: Averaged 10 per full season before that.
— Jay Bruce (yes!), 19.6, age 23: Had 9.2 the year before in 2/3 of a season, so not a huge jump.
— Gerardo Parra, 19.5, age 26: Had 2 prior years over 10.
— Jason Heyward, 19.4, age 24: Averaged 11 per full season over the prior 4.
Trout’s averaged less than 1 run per full season over the last 6, with a high of 4.7. He doesn’t have a great arm. I just can’t see him getting to 25 defensive runs.
Keep the Trout WAR-porn coming! Seriously, I will read any FG piece that references Trout and WAR.
Some other ideas…
– How many lineups can Trout out-WAR in 2019?
– How many GIDP’s would Trout need to hit into to match Pujols in WAR?
– How many Bryce Harpers would you need to stack to equal Trout in WAR?