Mike Trout Is Baseball’s $430 Million Man
Have you had your morning coffee yet? Here’s something for you:
BREAKING: Star center fielder Mike Trout and the Los Angeles Angels are finalizing a record-breaking 12-year contract worth more than $430 million, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Details: https://t.co/bROnnC11Uh
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 19, 2019
In the seven years since his debut as a precocious 19-year-old back in 2011, Mike Trout has been worth 64.9 wins above replacement — nearly 20 more than the next-greatest mark achieved over that period (Buster Posey’s 47.3). If you look since 2012, which eliminates Trout’s 0.7 win 2011, the gulf is just as wide: Trout’s 64.2 wins are as far ahead of second-place Posey (45.4) as Posey is of 21st place Jonathan Lucroy (26.3). Trout holds the record for most WAR through age 21, 22, 23, 24, and 26 (Ty Cobb beat him out for 25). Mike Trout is 23rd all time in career WAR through age 30, and he is only 27 years old. Mike Trout is already an average Hall of Famer, and his career can’t yet drive or buy a drink.
Now he’s also signed the biggest contract in professional sports history, besting in one swoop both Zack Greinke’s $34.4 million AAV (Trout will get $36 million), and, by $100 million, Bryce Harper’s briefly record-setting $330 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. Trout will be an Angel for life and he is already the greatest to ever wear that uniform. Craig Edwards will have a much longer post putting this all in context later today, but for now, please take this time to discuss, reflect, and enjoy. Mike Trout is baseball’s greatest player, he should be the game’s biggest star, and he’s finally going to be paid like it.
Rian Watt is a contributor to FanGraphs based in Seattle. His work has appeared at Vice, Baseball Prospectus, The Athletic, FiveThirtyEight, and some other places too. By day, he works with communities around the world to end homelessness.
As much as I know the player’s association doesn’t like someone getting discounts, and anything less than all the money is a discount for Trout, as a fan I love that he’ll be an Angel for life. And as a fan, I mean a baseball fan in general, not Angel fan.
Imagine if LeBron had made the playoffs once his entire career. And was immediately swept that one time. That’s Mike Trout.
As much as the “one team his entire career” narrative is quaint, it’s really, really bad for baseball that the defining player of his (or possibly any) generation just decided to spend his entire career with a mediocre team on the West Coast.
Bummer.
Basketball comparisons aren’t great, because “one great player” immediately makes a team playoff viable. Dan Marino is probably better comparison, imo. I don’t think that Dan Marino’s situation was “bad for football” as a whole.
One great player? Tell that to the Lakers.
As for Marino, he at least made it to the Superb Owl.
A. Imagine the Lakers without LeBron.
B. LeBron is 34 and doesnt play defense (like at all) in the regular season.
It certainly wasn’t bad for this Dolphins fan!
It’s not that unusual, though. Ty Cobb had 17 total postseason games. Honus Wagner had 15. Bonds had 48. Mays had 25. Ted Williams had 7. Even Rickey, who played forever, only had 60.
Ty Cobb played in three World Series.
Honus Wagner played in two World Series.
Willie Mays played in four World Series.
Ted Williams played in a World Series.
Barry Bonds played in a World Series.
Rickey Henderson played in three World Series.
Mike Trout played in an ALDS.
Trout’s career is also probably only 1/3 over.
How many teams existed when dudes like Wagner and Cobb were playing? And how many playoff series were there ahead of the World Series? There sure as fuck was not an ALDS and wild card round (applicable to Williams, Mays and portions of Rickey and Bonds’ careers, as well). Not to mention the whole separate league for non-white people thing. It was WAY easier to make the series back then.
They won the pennant in the early years by having the best win percentage.
“It was WAY easier to make the series back then.”
The Red Sox (or, really, anyone other than the Yankees) would beg to differ.
Not really. Only the top team in each league would get there. Now, there are 10 teams (1/3 of the league) who make the playoffs and wild card teams regularly make the WS. And the comment noted how few playoff games those players played. With only one postseason series per year it is clearly much harder to accumulate playing time in the playoffs.
Yeah, there were only 24 teams in 1970 (near the end of Mays’ career) and only 16 in 1927 (near the end of Cobb’s). You don’t have to be a statistician to figure out that’s a lot easier to make a world series when you’re competing against 7 other teams than when you’re competing against 15.
Overstate things much? Mike Trout has played 7 full seasons plus a cup of coffee and is just 27 years old.
Cobb – 3 WS in 24 years (3 WS in first 8 years and never again)
Wagner – 2 WS in 21 years (1 WS in first 8 years – 1/2 those teams <.500))
Mays – 4 WS in 22 years (2 WS in first 8 years)
Williams – 1 WS in 19 years (1 WS in first 8 years and never again)
Bonds – 1 in 22 years (0 WS in first 8 years)
Henderson – 3 WS in 25 years (0 WS in first 8 years)
Do you really need a dozen commenters to explain why these aren’t meaningful comparisons? This seems like intellectual dishonesty to me.
Pujols has spent the entirety of his contract detracting from the value that Trout has provided. Pujols will only be with the Angels so much longer, so things can change.
You assume changing teams guarantees you a playoff spot or World Series win. If anything, Trout is proof that unlike basketball, you need more than one good player to just have a chance to go to the playoffs.
Why do people care about postseason. He has the opportunity to play in 162 games per season. Enjoy.
“Why do people care about postseason.”
I found the Mariners fan! What do I win?
Basketball is a lame example. Each team only plays five players at a time and all a team needs to win a title is to roster one of the NBA’s top 5 active superstars plus another top tier player to guarantee a long playoff run (insert 2018-19 Lebron James Lakers’ jokes here).
Baseball relies on nine players at a time and technically more as the pitcher’s spot is split among five starters and a designated hitter. No one player can ever influence the outcome of a team’s season the way an NBA top 5 superstar can.
I’d also note that half the league makes the playoffs in the NBA while just a quarter of the league does so in MLB so the chances of making the playoffs are obviously much easier in basketball.
Would it have been better for baseball if he had joined the Yankees, Red Sox, or Dodgers? I would think that creating parity is “better for baseball,” and joining a rebuilding team is one of the better outcomes if you want to create parity.
As we’ve seen in the last few years, a team can go from “mediocre” to competitive within a season or two. I think it’s a good thing that the Angels are looking to spend money and get better. With some good, young pieces like Ohtani and Simmons, they probably think they’re just a few moves and lucky breaks away from being competitive.
>53% of all teams in the NBA make the playoffs every year. 33% or more realistically 26.7% make it in the MLB.
So a mediocre team on the East Coast would have been okay?
It’s a shame that the Pujols contract and pitching injuries have limited Trout’s post-season appearances, but the past already happened regardless of whether Trout was going to become a free agent. The only question moving forward is whether from 2021 – 2030 (the new years) the Angels will be a playoff-caliber team.
Nobody knows the answer to that question, but there is no compelling reason to believe that the Angels have a worse chance at being a playoff team during those years than any other baseball team (with exception, perhaps, of the Yankees).
You’re gonna get killed but you raise the flip side to what I and many fans felt when we read he’d been extended. We feel good because we like players spending a career with one team, we love Trout period, but you’re point about Trout being almost hidden in Anaheim is a legitimate challenge for the marketing of baseball.
aside from his few endorsements when he didn’t have a gargantuan contract to fall back on, Trout has never really shown he wants to be marketed in that way. If anything, this contract shows he’s happy quietly being the greatest player of his generation living in an area he must enjoy living in.
You’re probably just being polite by not bringing up his lifetime .083 postseason batting average, which only bolsters your argument.
What a loser! He’s on pace for something like $170 million per postseason hit. It’s real, it’s plain math. Angels got shafted, they should’ve given that money to Marco Scutaro. Remember that NLCS when he hit .500? THAT is a real winner.
That is a lot of money to be offered, but I wonder if there was some hesitation on Trout’s part due to a desire to play for a winner.
That desire was probably tempered a bit by uncertainty about the long-term contract market for any player – even the greatest player alive – at age 29.
I think it’s rather unlikely that he would be pressed for cash at age 29. Or 129. The boost to his historical legacy in playing for a single team seems like a more plausible factor.
Obviously I wasn’t saying he’d be pressed for cash.
Athletes tend to want to maximize their cash though, even when they don’t fear having to stand in line at soup kitchens.
If he slipped in the next 2 years the odds of landing a 10 year contract at 29 would go down quite a bit. Teams aren’t paying for what you used to be anymore. Now he’s got contract certainty through age 39. I’m sure he’ll pay lip service to how special it is to play all his games for one team but I’d guess the certainty was a bigger factor.
My vote is Mike Trout simply wanted to avoid free agency or even speculation about it. Which would start up as he got nearer the end of this contract. Trout seems to really, really dislike the circus. Another reason I really like him.
It would seem very Mike Trout to leave money on the table in order to focus on being great (or the greatest) at baseball.
Peace of mind.
All he has to think about is playing the game and staying healthy.
I suspect that Trout is convinced the Angels are committing to building a winning team and will be just as likely, by 2021 or 2022, to be a world series contender as any other team.
They have been willing to spend, they just spent poorly. I think it is reasonable to think they will try and build a winner though.
He probably would have been a steal at $40mil/yr or $500 mil for .
God, you just have to hope that once Pujols’ contract comes off the book they go HAM on building something to compliment Trout.
Only 3 years / $87M to go!
Only $154 million for Miggy!
They could also just do it now instead of waiting. I have no clue how Keuchel and Grandal haven’t been Angels since December tbh
Well, Grandal was a weird situation. But Keuchel needed to be an Angel at least a month ago. And still needs to.
Boras and his inane misreads of the FA market. He’s already ruined Moustakas and cost Maldanado a decent chunk of change. Now, with Gio signing, probably cost Keuchel too.
He’s a dinosaur in today’s analytics age.
Happy he’s not going anywhere. I hope the Angels can get him to some playoff games, though.
If The Commissioners Office cared about overtaking the NBA, it should veto this contract and demand that the Angels trade Trout to a big market team.
You mean like a team in the LA area?
FG isn’t letting me like this reply more than once. But I want to.
The Angels are not an LA team. The only LA team is the Dodgers.
This is so dumb. Are the Mets a big market team?
No, because the Yankees steal all their thunder. A city can only have one team if we are being honest. The only exception is Chicago, but that’s due to a unique socio-economic environment.
If anything, the White Sox have the smallest market of the second banana teams.
I’m really hoping you thought he would’ve signed with the Mets in FA.
No, I think Toronto or Philly would have got him.
Overtake it in what?
MIKE TROUT
Well that’s boring. I was really looking forward to the free agency frenzy.
Very on brand for Mike Trout!
Now he can continue to never be in any commercials, give boring interviews, and maintain complete anonymity everywhere he goes. It’s like if Jordan had the personality of Tim Duncan.
Or like if Tim Duncan had the personality of Tim Duncan.
I remember him being in a commercial. Sliding into a base or something?
Or maybe he was eating Subway? The fact that I can’t remember proves your point I suppose
He did a hilarious commercial for Body Armor sports drink. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gbw6xe1wuQ
You’ll find his mug on boxes of SuperPretzels in your grocer’s freezer…
He has never shown much interest in that stuff.
It’s a shame that the greatest player of my life (non-Barry-Bonds-on-steroids division) will spend his entire career with a joke organization that can’t make the playoffs. Not to say that you can’t be a great player without postseason success — Ty Cobb and Ted Williams are both top-5 players of all time and neither ever won a championship — but it’s disappointing in an era when a third of the teams make the playoffs every year that Trout is stuck on a large-market team that’s incapable of escaping mediocrity.
Yeah, it would have made more sense to go to the Phillies, who have been extremely successful in every single one of their 2010’s postseason appearances.
I was thinking the Yankees, with Giancarlo Stanton moving to first base, but sure.
I don’t have any skin in this game, but I’m always happy to see fans of the huge market teams disappointed. Especially when they’re coveting other teams’ stars.
Steal
I might have maybe enjoyed it more watching the owners collude during his FA as people defend their outward inaction, but I guess the MLB gets to hang around a little longer this way.
I actually concur with the “Steal” part. He’s barely making more AAV than Greinke? If baseball inflation continues at its going rate (and presuming the next labor contract will goose the free agent market back closer to its historical norm), I think Trout left 9 figures on this table.
Remember all that talk about how MLB free agent values were scaling down?
Remember when every other player isn’t literally the best player by age 27?
Trout was 2 seasons away from free agency
That actually seems like a bargain. Compared to Machado’s & Harper’s contract, Trout is probably worth around $600 million. But with injury risk factored in, that was probably never going to happen.
Injury and decline. The contract takes him significantly farther into his 30s than either Harper’s or Machado’s.
I’m as big a Trout fanboy as it’s possible for a Mariners fan to be and I’d be willing to bet on him providing value even at ages 36-39, but that’s pretty old in an era where careers are shorter on average than they were 1-2 decades ago.
No it doesn’t. Harper signed for 13 years.
You’re right. I was thinking Trout’s last year would be his age 39 season (to Harper’s 38) but I was off by a year. Trout’s close to the borderline (born August 7, cutoff June 30) that makes him “old” for his age-season the way baseball tracks such things. Threw me off.
$660M.
He out produces them both, combined, so getting paid double would not be outrageous. $55M AAV.
But $430M isn’t half bad. Puts him over $500Mcareer earnings.
Too bad Sullivan didn’t get to write this one.
A shame for all of us, friend.
Knowing that there are incredible error bars on long-term projections, $/WAR and in turn value and surplus value, and maybe he declines faster than the normal curve, etc…
That’s a whopper of a deal.
Part of me is mad that we have now been robbed twice of Mike Trout in free agency (who would be the greatest free agent in baseball history) but I’m not sure how much more he truly would have gotten in reality.
I also wonder if he was willing to forego free agency just two years away because he was worried about what the market will look like then, as baseball will still be under the current CBA.
I love Mike Trout as a player, but I don’t believe those WAR numbers or the $/WAR.
$9M with 5% inflation
And I agree, like I said in my first sentence, there are giant error bars on these. But it’s hard to see how Trout isn’t worth at least several hundred million in excess of $430M
He gets hurt. That is how. And that risk is real for all players.
Particularly for one who doesn’t seem all that concerned with his own well being if it comes into conflict with making a play.
So then teams shouldn’t sign anyone then because they could all get hurt.
No, but teams are aware of the downside risk of long-term, high AAV commitments and therefore risk averse about them.
Echoing Wonderful Terrific Monds’ point, I’m very dubious that 97.1 WAR between ages 27 and 39 is a reasonable mean projection for Trout, even as great of a player as he is.
Using the search tool here, there are four position players who totaled more WAR over their age 27 to 39 seasons: Ruth, Bonds, Wagner, and Mays. And the totals start to drop off quickly as we move down the list: #10 (Schmidt) is below 80 WAR, #16 (Boggs) is below 70 WAR, and #29 (Brooks Robinson) is below 60 WAR. https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2018&month=0&season1=1871&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=27,39&filter=&players=0&page=1_50
I strongly suspect there’s a methodological problem with simply applying standard aging curves to players who are at an elite level in their 20’s. Expressing this problem a bit simplistically, a player who ends up missing time due to more injuries (whether chronic issues due to aging, or simply idiosyncratic injuries during games) will accumulate 0 WAR when out, whether his true talent when injured is 2 WAR, 5 WAR, or 8 WAR.
* true talent when healthy, obviously not when injured
I’m pretty sure that neither the $9M nor the 5% inflation are good assumptions.
That said, if you look at $8M with no inflation, you’re still winding up with massive surplus value. If he stays healthy (which is why he took the deal, because who knows what could happen).
Assuming 9M a win now and large static annual increases to arrive at 16.16M a win in 2031, with zero decline until he’s 33 years old, is not something I can get on board with.
Starting at 5M a win, and going up .33M a year in $ per win so that a win in 2031 is 8.96M, with his decline starting in 2 years, at age 30 as it should, brings the value of the contract to $578M.
No need to dress this up. An amazing deal for an amazing player. But Jesus Harold Christ, stop with the 1.1B valuation, it just discredits everything…
What evidence is there that $/WAR is $5M?
FanGraphs has it at $8M/WAR and that’s using their numbers that haven’t been updated in years. So do you think $/WAR has gone down since 2012 or so?
All the valuation framework done over the past few years has had $/WAR significantly higher.
If you want to discuss that there are error bars on $9M/WAR with 5% inflation and a typical aging curve, okay, let’s discuss that. But I said as such in my post.
Eno’s work is that it’s about at $7.9M, I believe. I can get on board with that. It looked like it was more like $7M based on some quick number crunching I did but everyone else in the comments section who has been tracking this has been finding it in the $7.5M-8M range, so I buy it.
The $9M/win is actually what teams got for it, not what the expected going rate was. This means when someone signs Pujols, we’re assuming that they are paying $200M to get 2 wins. This is a case where “revealed preference” doesn’t tell us that much because teams don’t have certainty about what they’re buying (not like buying a car, for example).
Even easier math if you assume (a) Harper and Machado have set the market price for elite stars in their prime, and (b) Trout is very likely to outperform them both by at least 2 wins/year over the next 10-12 years. Getting an extra 2 wins/year for less than $10m/year is a no-brainer great tradeoff.
You heard the man. Stop acting like we’re talking about a multi-billion dollar industry here, guys. That totally discredits the discussion.
I agree with your overall point, but my understanding is that the deal will go through 2030, not 2031. And the standard aging curve usually has a steeper drop-off in the age 38 season.
Yep you are right. It’s 0.75 WAR after 37, so let’s call it the three end seasons. That’s~$20M in value extra it needs to be adjusted down.
Cut all those numbers by a third.
He’s still a monster and worth the money.
Even at half the projections: 44WAR.
Besides, if there is one case where paying a player for past production makes perfect sense, this is it. And the team paying is the team he earned it with.
Fair deal for both sides.
So I think there was a general consensus that on the open market, if he kept performing like he has, Mike Trout would get $500M or more. If you think that a team should get a 75% or 80% discount for forgoing free agency (giving up the possible of a mega-payday for some certainty), than whether this deal is good for the Angels/Trout depends on how much work that “or more” part is doing.
I’m inclined to think that this is more or less a fair deal. If Mike Trout breaks his everything and is never the same, he guards against that catastrophic outcome with a half-billion dollars in earnings, but if he stays on his current trajectory it will be good deal for the Angels. He’ll still be good when Jo Adell and the other kids are up, and for Ohtani’s entire contract.
I like that it got done, and now the Angels need to sign Dallas Keuchel. Get this man a ring!
EDIT: It looks like it’s only About $370M in new money, since it rips up the last two years of Trout’s current deal. If so, this is really a 10 year, $370M extension relative to the free agent market, which is an ENORMOUS steal for the Angels. The Angels won here–this is way more than an 80% discount. Now they really have no excuses to sign Keuchel!
Trout was already locked up for his age 27 and 28 years and would have been hitting free agency at 29, not 26 like Machado and Harper. He probably could have done a little better than 10/370 on the open market, but it isn’t an unreasonable discount to buy out the risk of an injury over the next two years.
I think you mean a 20% discount. An 80% discount suggests he should have been paid $1.85 billion over the last 10 years of the deal.
This, yes. 80% of the value of what he would have gotten. Sorry for the confusion, and thank you.
In other news, the Yankees signed Gio Gonzalez to a minor league deal with incentives.
Boooo. Does Gio have more than a 2% chance of outperforming German?
queue the “this contract is illegal under California law” article from Ms. Ring
Why on earth would Sheryl say this contract is illegal?
Because under California law there is a maximum allowable contract length. It’s been written about here before, but it’s unclear if the law is applicable under the circumstances. No personal service contracts are enforceable past seven years.
As an Angels fan I am so happy that the annoying trash sports blogs will stop the “Angels MUST trade Trout now” or “Trout is coming to the Phillies” blog posts.
The “Angels are wasting Trouts years” will continue but they are just jealous SOBs that dont get to watch him on a nightly basis at The Big A. Long live Trout, today is a good day for Angels fans. Eppler can now get back to work digging this team out from the Dipoto years. They won’t need a long time before they are back to 2002-2009 form.
The problem is that nobody else gets to see him. And right now they’re about 5 starters short of a rotation.
gotta figure between Heaney and Skaggs that’s like, what… 1 starter right… only 4 starters to go
It’s zero starters. A bounceback from Harvey is their best shot at a starter at this point.
“Nobody gets to see Trout,” in a world with MLB.TV, is an extremely strange argument. It’s 2019 – every player on every team is as easy to see as making a comment on Fangraphs.
Plus with interleague play he’ll sooner or later visit every team in the NLas well the AL.
The Angels are wasting Trout’s best years. And yes, I’m totally jealous. What non-Angels fan wouldn’t be? Doesn’t make that point wrong.
Well done Angels!
Now I’m hoping that the Red Sox can find a way to fit a $36M/year AAV extension for Mookie into their budget….
Alas, Cleveland fans have no such hope for Lindor.
The second team in a metro area gets less coverage than most small-market teams. This ensures we East Coast, NL-team fans will virtually never get to see him play.
What makes you think any of the rest of us care? Oh, yeah, East Coast narcissism. Never mind.
Letting Trout languish in that garbage of a franchise for his career is such a tragedy. Don’t you love Trout’s prime wasted on a team that wants to bat a negative WAR player 3rd in the order? It should be hard to screw up prime Trout and Ohtanti on the same team but the Angels will find a way to do it by letting a 42 year old Pujols play the field AND bat cleanup behind them.
Found the Phillies fan
You’d have thought a Phillie fan would be used to batting a negative WAR player 3rd or 4th in the order.
As a Braves fan, the Phillies would be my 30th choice for him. I just abhor blatant inefficiency anywhere in the game. Pujols’ place in the Angels starting lineup has been in the most egregious error in baseball for 3 years running.
Well, with regard to Pujols alone, found a dead-on analysis. I’d hoped the managerial change meant that there was now room to at least push Albert down and away from Trout in the batting order, but that sure don’t look to be the case. Rather appears that Arte’s still nowhere near emotionally ready to cop to such a humongous personal professional mistake.
You’re clearly knowledgeable and have a good grip on Angels games. I’m sure you’ve seen at least 3 since 2013.
Which negative WAR player is batting 3rd? Do you even know who is on the Angels? If you’re exaggerating, why? There are plenty of easy low hanging fruit to punch at with Anaheim, but you smugly pick something that hasn’t been accurate in half a decade to show how much smarter you are than everyone.
Albert Pujols has another 3 years of haunting your franchise. You better hope Arte will open up the checkbook when their window opens up in 2022 after Big Al’s contract ends. It does not bode well that he was unwilling to shell out for a discounted Keuchel this year.
In fact , in 2017 Pujols was a negative WAR player and he batted 3rd in more than half of their games. In 2018 he moved to 4th but still produced negative WAR. Chaining your best hitters is the best way to produce runs, and Pujols is breaking up the Trout, Upton, Ohtani, Simmons chain and unfortunately this is likely to continue for the next 3 years.
Even as a Mariner fan, I think this is great. He came up an Angel, he should retire an Angel, and he should enter the Hall as an Angel.
With that out of the way, the Angels can get back to their current state of mediocrity.
You probably didn’t say that with Beltre and Cano
I think Beltre’s time with the Mariners was nothing special. And while Cano performed well he was probably happy they traded him this offseason.
You can bet Jerry and the front office in Seattle were thrilled they were actually able to move that contract this offseason. That was huge for Seattle.
Right, because every Mariner fan jumped up and down with glee, believing their time in the sun had come after Beltre was signed, and again with the arrival of Cano.
Neither came up first with Seattle.
But Edgar did.
With all the poor people in America, nobody deserves that amount of money
Maybe you should change your name from “miltonfriedman” then if you’re unhappy with rich people?
Is there only 1 Milton Friedman? Rich people cause poor people to stay poor
I think your namesake might have some different arguments to make about that…
What would that argument be?
Uncle Milty, please look at the bright side by the time the contract runs out AOC (or someone on her “team”) will be President and Mr. Trout will “only” get to keep $10 million per year and “the people” will allocate the rest. 😉
You really believe a socialist will be president in 10 years? One can believe
This ‘friedman’ actually does sound very much a socialist. More seriously speaking, take away the huge public subsidies professional sports gets (and maybe some future AOC might??) and every longterm player contract will look instantly bad.
They will also genetically engineer pigs with wings by them.
You would think that someone with the username “Milton Friedman” would have googled the name before using it. (And, if this is MF’s actual name, that he would have come across his namesake at some point)
I must’ve missed the part where the Angels were weighing their options between spending $430 million on Trout and donating that same $430 million to food banks and affordable housing projects. If that was the case, then yeah Trout should be ashamed of himself.
You’re on a roll today.
I knew I should have been the best baseball player of my generation instead of a lawyer.
Nice subtle brag
Angels got a nice discount on this one.
In 2 years, the Angels will still have Trout, but they might not have a stadium to play in. Priorities!
There are lots of stadiums!
There is only one Trout.
This. Any idiot can build a stadium (and many do). Nobody has yet figured out how to build a Mike Trout.
I’m not saying they made the wrong call; just that it’s an interesting one.
“Well, now we DEFINITELY won’t trade Yadi for Trout now that he’s making all that money.”
– All BFIBs today
Both the biggest contract ever and most underpaid guy ever at the same time……disappointed we didnt get to see what free agency offers he would have gotten.
But all that is the past. Theyre signing him for the future.
This contract extension is the most Mike Trout thing ever.
He’s never cared about the money. Doesn’t want the spotlight. Doesn’t want news coverage. Doesn’t want months of people talking about him. Lets Harper strut like a peacock for months and then signs a bigger deal one day before the season starts with no fanfare.
It’s the equivalent of politicians dropping news on a Friday afternoon. He didn’t want endless ongoing discussion. Announce the deal right before it gets buried with other coverage and move on.
I know MLB wishes Trout was more like LeBron and wanted media coverage. But he’s just going to go about his business, hide in the Dodgers’ shade, avoid the spotlight, and be rightfully paid like the best player in history. And there won’t be any question which logo goes on his plaque in Cooperstown.
Come the off-season, Trout goes back to New Jersey, doesn’t he? That was my impression, anyway. i dunno, maybe he just goes back for family stuff?
He got paid without looking like a moneygrubbing mercenary..
He seems to be a pretty clever guy. Or he has a good agent. Or both.
Isn’t Kershaw 2nd in Fangraphs WAR for 2011-2018? I think you ran only batters.
Wow, Angels got a steal. He would’ve gotten what machado and Harper got combined if he waited until FA