What Would a Peak Year From Mike Trout Look Like?

Every full season Mike Trout has put together as a Major League Baseball player has been great. Through his age-24 season, Mike Trout has been worth roughly 48 Wins Above Replacement, averaging around +9.5 wins per season. Through age-24, that is more than any other player, with Ty Cobb a close second, and Mickey Mantle, Mel Ott, Jimmie Foxx, and Ted Williams a bit further behind. Trout is already in third place through age-25, 10th place through age-26, and 23rd place through age-27 with three seasons to be played before he gets there. Mike Trout is great. Everybody knows that.

But what would happen if Mike Trout had a good year in comparison to, well, Mike Trout?

Steamer and ZiPS have weighed in on Mike Trout’s 2017 season and they see a player worth +8.5 to +9 wins next year. That is sort of the midpoint of what should be expected given his track record. Over the past five years his WAR has been +10.3, +10.5, +7.9, +9.0, and +9.4, but much of the variation has had to do with defensive fluctuations. Trout’s wRC+ has been remarkably consistent, in between 167 and 176 every season. While Trout has few historical comps, it is interesting to look at how the players he is closest to have accumulated their WAR through a similar age. Unlike Trout, players like Mantle and Cobb saw big increases in their performance that we have not seen from Trout.

Trout’s route to greatness has come with an incredible consistency that has literally never happened before. With many players who are maybe one-fourth the player Mike Trout is, we often wonder what would happen if they put all together. Maybe the player had patience one year, power the next, a good strikeout rate in another year–we wonder what would happen if they put it all together. That player goes from being average or slightly above average to an all-star, maybe even an MVP candidate.

We can’t make the same leaps with Mike Trout. There simply isn’t enough inconsistency in his performance to allow for a great leap. He is Mike Trout and already an all-time great. However, there is some room to imagine that if a few things broke his way there might be a slightly higher ceiling than what we have seen thus far. If his projections see him as a 9-win player, certainly there are some fluctuations that could put him higher than that. It really isn’t even that hard.

Here’s Mike Trout’s stat line from each of the past five seasons with a few career highs highlighted:

We could just go through and give him his career highs in counting statistics and see how things come out, but it is probably more prudent to take some of his rate stats and adjust them in a full, healthy season. So we are going to give him 716 plate appearances. We will give him the 17% walk rate that he got last year and the 19% strikeout rate that he got in 2012. While a 19% strikeout rate does seem rather low, remember that his career strikeout rate is around 22% and he has lowered it each of the past two seasons, down to 20% last year. These numbers aren’t too far off from what he did in 2016.

So out of 716 plate appearances, we just made 122 walks and 136 strikeouts. He’s averaged nine intentional walks per season, and while it is fair to think he might get a few more than that like he has the past couple years, we will stick with that number this year. We’ll do the same with his seven sacrifice flies. He hit 41 homers in 2015, but that was in sightly fewer plate appearances than we’re giving him, so that will up things to 43 homers. Last season, Trout’s BABIP was .371 — his career average is .360 — but in his first full season it was .383, so we’ll go with that number.

Given that knowledge, we have his batting average at .343 and his on-base percentage at .461. Both would be career highs but within 20 points of past figures. In 2015, Trout’s ISO was .290, so let’s run with that figure. We already know he has 43 homers and 198 hits. His career average for triples is seven so let’s go ahead and give him that. Leaving just the singles and the doubles, we can give Trout 25 doubles and 123 singles. We might be selling the doubles short here a bit, and we could probably turn some of the singles into outs and doubles, but we aren’t too far off base here.

Given those components, and assuming the constants from 2016 stay the same, Trout ends up with a .343/.461/.633 stat line and a .455 wOBA on the season, about 30 points higher than his current career high from the 2012 season. Using the formula for wRC, we can convert Trout’s wOBA to runs, which gives us 81 offensive runs above average. We’ll add three runs for his park. Last season, Trout was worth 9 runs above average on the base paths, and his career high is just above 14, so let’s give him 12 runs in a good Trout season. On defense, Trout has averaged around 2 runs above average with a high of 13 in his first full season, so let’s give him six runs above average on defense. Then we’ll add 2.5 runs for being in the American League, 20.5 for replacement and end up with 125 runs above replacement.

Last season 9.778 runs was worth one win, so we take 125 runs above replacement, divide by 9.778 and come up with the greatest non-Babe Ruth season of all time.

A normal Mike Trout season is already great. We’ve now seen enough seasons to know what a normal Mike Trout season looks like. It is highly likely that we will never see anything above a normal Mike Trout season, given that the bar is already incredibly high. However, the possibility exists that Mike Trout might have a few things go his way where he equals his best power year, replicates his walk and strikeout numbers from last year, has a good year running the bases, and puts up good numbers on defense. If those things happen, we are going to see one of the very greatest statistical seasons of all-time, better even than any season Barry Bonds has ever produced. It’s probably unfair to everyone to dream of a more amazing version of Mike Trout, but Mike Trout is already a little unfair.