Mike Trout and One-Man Teams

Mike Trout’s exploits are well known, but no matter how well Mike Trout plays, his team will not succeed without productive play from others in the lineup. Mike Trout is not the first great player with a less than stellar supporting cast. It is something he has gone through already in his brief career. In 2012 and 2014, the Angels had solid teams surrounding Trout that won nearly 90 games in 2012 and won the division in 2014, but in 2013, the rest of the Angels provided poor production and the team wasted a 10-win season. The Angels have gotten off to a slow start at 12-15 and they are certainly far from out of the race at this point, but based on the start of the season and the projections from here on out, the Angels could have trouble providing Trout with support and staying in the playoff hunt as the year goes on.

On offense this season, Mike Trout has been 11.6 runs above average, good for sixth in all of baseball while the rest of the position players have been 26.6 runs below average. Even with Mike Trout, the team has an 85 wRC+ in the early going, ranking 25th in Major League Baseball. Mike Trout is hitting .302/.404/.552. while the rest of the team is .218/.275/.323. Garrett Richards, C.J. Wilson, and Matt Shoemaker should perform well in the rotation, but the team projects to finish the season around .500. No matter how hard he tries, Mike Trout cannot end every game like this:

The rest of the season projections are not incredibly promising for position players not named Trout. The only position players projected for better than average production for the rest of the season are Kole Calhoun and Albert Pujols. Combining the team’s current production with their FanGraphs Depths Charts projections for the rest of the season looks like this:

In the last fifty years, only 26 players have achieved nine-win seasons, and those players have accumulated 47 of those seasons. Mike Trout has two of those seasons, and if he were to have another one in 2015, he would join Barry Bonds (8), Alex Rodriguez (6), Joe Morgan (3), and Mike Schmidt (3) as the only players during that time to have at least three nine-win seasons. Cal Ripken, Jr., Ken Griffey, Jr., Rickey Henderson, and Carl Yastrzemski are the only other players with more than one nine-win season in the last fifty years.

Great players have had varying degrees of help during their magnificent seasons. Ken Griffey, Jr. and Alex Rodriguez are the only position player teammates in the last half-century to post nine-win seasons in the same year. The graph below shows the highest teammate WAR during the season where the player achieved nine wins.

The green bar is the updated projection for Kole Calhoun. While a nine-win season is hardly a guarantee for any player, even Mike Trout, if he meets his projections, he will have one of the worst second-best teammates in a great year in history. The A-Rod and Griffey, Jr. season is at the top, and here is the rest of the top ten, including the teammate and WAR.

The Big Red Machine of the 70s had several great players, and that 2004 St. Louis Cardinals’ team also had Albert Pujols not too far behind. The list above shows some of the greatest single-season duos in history while the below list gets closer to the one-man teams. The great players below played without an upper-level caliber second banana out in the field, as with a cutoff of a five-win season.

Mike Trout has already made this list once as Howie Kendrick was the second-best option in 2013 and had under three wins. The biggest gap on the list occurred in 2004, when Barry Bonds hit .362/.609/.812 for a wRC+ of 233, and four Ray Durhams would have been needed to surpass one Bonds. The worst-performing teammate above was Sammy Sosa’s teammate Ricky Gutierrez. Sosa hit 64 home runs while Gutierrez’s slightly below average bat and average defense at short gave him an average season.

Many of the teams above managed to win quite a few games, but knowing only the second-best position player on the team could mask decent depth behind the top two players. Taking the teams in the last chart above, and then looking at team WAR from position players without the best player helps show which players were playing on an island. The graph below shows rest of the team WAR for the 18 players listed above as well Mike Trout and the Angels’ projections for the rest of this season.

The 1977 Phillies were a great team with nine players with at least two wins. Bake McBride, Larry Bowa, and Garry Maddux all had very good seasons to support Schmidt and Luzinski barely played below the five-win threshold needed to qualify for this list. The 2005 New York Yankees team is an unusual one. The team won without any great pitching seasons as Randy Johnson’s 4.1 WAR was the highest on the staff and the only pitcher above three wins. Bernie Williams and Tony Womack each had seasons that were two wins below replacement level. The team trotted out A-Rod, Jeter, Giambi, Jorge Posada, Gary Sheffield, Hideki Matsui, and Robinson Cano and bludgeoned the opposing pitcher without regard for defense. Mariano Rivera closed down the games and the team won 95 games before losing a 3-2 series to the Angels in the first round.

Mike Trout is not all alone on the Angels. Kole Calhoun and Albert Pujols are solid players and the pitching staff should be adequate, but even another superlative season from Trout might not be enough to get them to the playoffs. Trout is in very good company in almost every conceivable statistic and when it comes to being a superstar without a solid surrounding cast, it is no different.