Los Angeles Angels: Mike Trout Is Closing In On History
Los Angeles Angels superstar Mike Trout is one of the best in the big leagues today, but he’s closing in on an achievement only a handful of all-time greats have ever accomplished.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past five years, you know that Mike Trout is good at baseball. The Los Angeles Angels’ star center fielder, at just 25 years old, is off to a historic start to his career, and if he remains healthy and productive could go down as one of the greatest to ever play the game.
Trout already has an MVP, a Rookie of the Year award, and five All-Star Game appearances, and is on pace to reach the vaunted ground of 500 home runs and 3,000 hits in his career, but perhaps his most impressive feat is the utter dominance he has displayed on the Wins Above Replacement leaderboard in his first five full seasons in MLB.
From 2012 to 2015, Trout has led American League position players in bWAR. He is the first position player in the history of the game to do so in his first four full seasons. Entering play on Saturday, he has a sizable advantage once again in 2016, with a 6.4 bWAR mark that tops Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros and his 5.9.
Already just the second player to lead the league in bWAR as a rookie (Paul Waner of the Pittsburgh Pirates also did so back in 1926), Trout is now closing in on rarefied air. Only a handful of players in MLB history have led the league in this statistic for five or more straight years, and the list is a who’s who of Hall of Famers.
- Mickey Mantle (five years): 1955-1959
- Willie Mays (five years): 1962-1966
- Rogers Hornsby (six years): 1917-1922
- Babe Ruth (six years): 1926-1931
- Albert Pujols (six years): 2005-2010
- Honus Wagner (eight years): 1902-1909
By the time the season reaches October, Trout appears a lock to own the Angels’ all-time career bWAR record for a position player, as he needs to amass just 1.5 more to pass Jim Fregosi. If his league lead holds and he claims the bWAR title for the fifth consecutive year, he’ll put himself on the list above as just the seventh player to ever do so.
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By historical standards, Trout will still have some work to do to put his name among the all-time bWAR greats, though. Hornsby, Ruth and Barry Bonds each led their league in the stat 11 times in their careers, while Wagner and Mays did so 10 times apiece. But given the historic start that Trout has gotten off to in his career, it doesn’t seem too far fetched that he could make it happen.