Mike Trout’s Inevitable Decline

Time is the ultimate badass. No matter how great you are, no matter how amazing you are at planning, time always wins in the end. And so it is in baseball as in other things. Mike Trout is, in many ways, the reigning king of baseball, that rare player who enters every season as the nearly-undisputed best in the game. Trout is no longer the young phenom and will turn 30 in just under 18 months, the threshold past which your baseball youth is symbolically gone. Young talent debuts every year while Trout inches closer and closer to retirement, and the day will come when he’s no longer baseball’s clear best.

Just being the best player projected coming into the season is practically enough to ensure your baseball immortality. I went back to the start of the modern era (1901) and collected the top WAR projection for every season, instructing ZiPS to calculate a Marcel-like method for the seasons prior to 2003, when the ZiPS projections did not exist. This is a quick way to demonstrate Trout’s dominance compared to other elite players in baseball history:

There are a couple of oddities in there, mostly caused by the difficulty of projecting a player who missed seasons due to war service, but otherwise it’s a Who’s Who of the Hall’s inner circle. I’d wager that in 50 years, all but two of these players will be in the Hall of Fame, with Charlie Keller likely on the outside, and Snuffy Stirnweiss certainly so. (If I’m still around in 50 years to test this prediction, I also wager I’ll be a very shouty, curmudgeonly 91-year-old.)

In terms of the number of years at the top of the heap, Trout’s eight seasons already puts him in third place in modern baseball, behind only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. In terms of uninterrupted reigns, Trout’s eight consecutive seasons ties Bonds’ 1992-1999 stretch, meaning that if he has the top projection entering 2021, he’ll have earned his spot as the giocatore di tutti giocatori in baseball.

So, yeah, Mike Trout is really good. He’s essentially lapped the bus test at this point, meaning that if he was hit by a proverbial bus (why are we only hitting players with buses?), the 10-year eligibility requirement for Hall of Fame induction would be waived and he’d be easily ticketed to Cooperstown. He wouldn’t even just be barely limping across the threshold, either; if any player can ever make an inner-circle claim based on a decade, Trout is that guy.

Now, when will Trout finally be overthrown as the best player entering a season? Whether by injury, declining performance, or one of baseball’s newest young phenoms establishing their own cases for immortality, it will happen. In fantasy circles, you can argue that this may have already happened this year. Peruse some lists of average draft position and Ronald Acuña Jr. is going first in more drafts this season than Trout.

For a more specific estimate, I unleashed ZiPS on this question. And what a meta question it is, since I’m projecting projections! I ran the projections for all the top players in baseballs’ projections to estimate the probability of the players entering the given season with the best projection in baseball. This paragraph may have set a record for the use of the word “projection.”

Quite obviously, these probabilities are only for players who are currently in professional baseball. ZiPS does not know if there’s some 12-year-old out there who’s going to go Soto on the league in 2028!

ZiPS projects Trout as the favorite to enter the season with the top projection in baseball for three more seasons, with only a single year in which he’s better than a coin flip. Yup, ZiPS likes Wander Franco as much as the scouts do. By the year 2029, Trout’s age-37 season (should he be bound by the constraints of spacetime like other humans), Trout’s only a one-in-100 shot to still have the best projection in baseball.

In one sense, Trout’s future has already been surpassed in the rest-of-career projections. Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto passed Trout in the 2019 projections, the first time anyone has beat him since 2012. Trout had typically lapped the field, with only a few players coming close at times: Carlos Correa, Bryce Harper, and then Francisco Lindor. As of this year’s projections, Trout now ranks sixth in rest-of-career wins, behind Acuña, Soto, Lindor, Cody Bellinger, and Gleyber Torres. And there are many other players within five wins of catching the Angels center fielder: Ozzie Albies, Bo Bichette, Vlad Guerrero Jr., Jack Flaherty, Alex Bregman, Gavin Lux, Wander Franco, and Walker Buehler.

So enjoy Mike Trout while he’s at the top of baseball because that day will pass and then never be again. His nearly casual excellence might sometimes feel a bit boring since it seems so effortless, but you’ll miss it when it’s gone. Valar morghulis.