Mike Trout and the Greatest Decades of All Time

We tend to think of decades in two ways. The first is to classify a set of years with the same number in the tens column i.e. 80s, 90s, etc. This makes for very easy groupings when looking at the best what-have-you of a decade, or an all-decade team, but it can also be fairly restrictive. Just because 1961 and 1969 are both in the 60s, doesn’t really make them the same; we certainly hope that 2029 looks both much different and better than 2020 is shaping up to be. This manner of grouping arbitrarily chooses endpoints. But there is another way to look at a decade, and that’s to see it as any 10-year period. It’s much less restrictive and provides for more comparisons, particularly when it comes to baseball players, who tend to have relatively short primes that overlap different decades.

That was a relatively long-winded way to lead into what I’ve done, which is to look at a rolling 10-year position player leaderboard for every year since 1909. It should come as no surprise that Mike Trout’s 74.3 WAR leads the 10-year period from 2010 to 2019. He also leads the period from 2009 to 2018 and from 2008 to 2017. Since he didn’t play in 2010 and only accumulated 0.7 WAR in 2011, he’s almost guaranteed to lead the periods ending from 2020 to 2022 as well. For reference, the only players since the 10-year period ending in 1909 to be 10-year WAR leaders in six separate seasons are Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, and Barry Bonds. Only 24 players have topped the 10-year WAR leaderboard even once in the last 111 seasons. Here are those players:

If Trout is even halfway decent over the next few years, he’ll end up in the top-five of that list with the potential to hit double-digits. This is what the top-three for position players has looked like over the last 10 years:

If you are wondering where Trout’s 73 WAR ranks historically, it’s 101th, though if Trout were to have standard Trout seasons in 2020 and 2021, he could get into the top 10 and potentially have the best 10-year period in history since Babe Ruth. Here are the very best decades in history:

Since World War II, only Willie Mays and Barry Bonds have averaged nine wins per season for an entire decade. The only other player in the last 75 years to hit 80 WAR in a 10-year period is Mickey Mantle. That’s a mark Trout would likely have gotten to this year with a full season’s worth of play, with an outside shot at topping Mays and Bonds with another Trout-like season in 2021. Even Trout’s 70 WAR puts him in pretty rare company. Below is the complete list of position players with 70-WAR decades:

Mike Trout is already guaranteed two more decades of at least 70 WAR, with an 80-WAR season a reasonable possibility. I should also note that Ted Williams hit his 70 WAR in 10 seasons from 1946-1955, but he also put together 67 WAR from 1939-1948 despite missing three years in that time due to World WAR II. Over the last 50 years only six players have bested Trout’s eight-year stretch over the course of a decade.

With a 5.5 WAR season in 2020, Trout would pass everyone on the list above except for Barry Bonds. There are a lot of ways to talk about just how good Mike Trout is as a baseball player, and this post is evidence that we haven’t run out of ways to show his brilliance on the diamond.

Lastly, for the sake of being a completist, here’s the top-three in WAR for every 10-year period going back to 1909: