The Mike Trout Anomaly

I commented on a blog today which sparked a complex thought process. Mike Trout is absolutely on fire right now—hotter than a fire cracker in July. So far, he is 11 for 30 with 13 walks, seven runs scored, five home runs, 12 runs batted in and more than double the MLB average OPS of 1.508 (OPS is a statistic that measures a player’s overall offensive effectiveness). WOW. Trout has been baseball’s best player since he debuted as a starter back in 2012—and he’s still only 27 years old. He has spent the entirety of his career thus far with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, and will probably play the rest of his days there as well since he just signed a 12-year, $426 million contract extension to avoid free agency in the coming offseason.

This is where the gears turned in my head. The Los Angeles Angels have only made the playoffs twice in the last 10 years, and only once getting passed the ALDS in 2014 in a historically weak division in the AL West. Needless to say, Mike Trout is playing on a team that has seemingly been stagnant through virtually his whole career…which begs the question, why would he want to play his whole career with a team that doesn’t seem to be progressing? Another factor that plays into this is his hometown of Vineland, N.J.—he’s as far away as possible from home and only plays about 10 games a year that far east. Yankees fans were salivating at the imminent free agency season to have a run at Trout, only to have their ambitions thwarted by his gargantuan contract.

We saw huge contracts signed by Machado and Harper, the latter being the larger one, but both were trumped by Trout in late March. However, Machado and Harper’s signings felt different than Trout’s. With Machado, everyone felt as though he was dollar chasing and went to whatever team could offer him the most money.

With Harper, he left his beloved D.C. faithful to join a rising powerhouse in the Philadelphia Phillies—he was chasing success, since so many times his Nationals fell short in October. But Trout’s signing felt like loyalty over money and success. His contract was, in fact, the largest signed in the history of pro sports, but never once did baseball fans think he chased money. He wanted to stick to the team that gave him all his individual glory.

This fact makes him an anomaly because we have not seen many examples of such in recent years with rising contracts and team’s unwillingness to pay long-term deals. Therefore, players go elsewhere to teams that will. Seldom do we see players like Derek Jeter, Dustin Pedroia or Joe Mauer that all stuck with a single team throughout the entirety of their careers and I think there’s a large sense of admiration in that.

However, there’s a caveat. Mike Trout could break TONS of regular season records like WAR (wins above replacement—statistic that illustrates a single player’s contributions to their team), number of 40-40 seasons (40 homers and 40 stolen bases) or even Joe DiMaggio’s incredible 56-game hitting streak—but does any of that matter or become invalid if he never sniffs postseason glory?

We all remember the Jim Kellys, Don Mattinglys or Charles Barkleys of the sports world, incredible players who never found postseason glory, but not nearly as much as we remember the Tom Bradys or Yogi Berras (collective 16 championships between them). Would it not be a tragedy for a player of Trout’s caliber to have a career like that? A player like him doesn’t come around all that often, oh and since he plays out west, much of the baseball population rarely gets a chance to watch him play. Playing in the postseason would alleviate that.

I am all for greatness during the regular season, but we all know that legends are made in the postseason. And as the great Babe Ruth once said: “Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”