Mike Trout needs his own thread

The situation is virtually identical to Kershaw last year: 149 innings, 2/3 of a season (guessing that's what Trout ends up playing), still finished third in WAR among pitchers and fifth in Cy Young voting. Normally I'd say top two would be extremely unlikely, but when you look at the leaders in WAR, there's lots of daylight. Give Judge one of the top two spots, then you've Betts (main competition), Altuve and Correa splitting votes, Garcia (possible), Hicks (no shot with Judge), and Simmons (no shot). So I could see that happening.

who is simmons? andrelton?

Yeah. Besides the fact he's a teammate of Trout's, how far back do you have to go to find a top two finisher who's contribution is largely defensive? (Actual question...Ozzie finished second in 1987--has there been anyone since?) Mind you, according to WAR, Simmons' value is primarily offensive this year.

well a good chunk of that offensive value is just the positional adjustment; he's hitting roughly league average. don't think he's the kind of guy who can really string together an MVP season, trout or no

Skimmed through all the MVP votes since '87, and I can't identify one defensive specialist who even finished in the Top Five of any MVP vote. Lots of great defenders, of course, but when Edmonds or I-Rod or Andruw Jones or Molina finished Top Five, it was in seasons where they had big years with the bat. When Lorenzo Cain finished third in 2015, and Lucroy finished high in 2014, they had great offensive years.

yeah simmons is a fun and super solid player, he's just not in that conversation

rehabbing w/ Inland Empire!

http://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/05/angels-mike-trout-reports-no-pain-after-first-rehab-game-with-inland-empire/

26 today

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGoqEmSWAAQxNiM.jpg

8th in WAR this year, 1.6 behind altuve. i mean i think he might end up leading the league again, if he maintains the pace of his season. he's only 1 pt behind Simmons for second...

lol he doesn't even have enough PAs to qualify according to FG

need 3.1 PAs per team game. he'll qualify by the end of the year

and yeah, i'd take him at even money to lead the AL in WAR by the end of the year

already went from 1.6 behind Altuve to 1.3 behind him in the two days since i posted that update.

Someone should collect online pieces like this and put them into a book:

http://www.si.com/mlb/2017/08/10/mike-trout-angels-hall-fame

It'd be a thousand pages long already.

Is there a biography yet? Obvious title just waiting there: A Little Trouty, but Quite Good.

pretty lame that trout is sitting tonight given the angels are in the wild card hunt and he needs PAs to qualify

It's his first day off since coming off the DL but more importantly he's in an 0-17 slump and looking terrible at the plate.

yeah fair point

btw you can still 'qualify' if youre short, they just add the empty PAs

4-4 with a HR, 3B, and a walk tonight. guess that slump is over

Angels first baseman C.J. Cron won a bet with Mike Trout, hitting two home runs in an 8-2 win over the Athletics. Trout will keep his side of the deal, buying Cron Phoenix Suns season tickets.

he's had a really rough month (for him, at least, 110 wRC+) with the bat but somehow has put up the BB/K of 2017 joey votto (17.2%/11.5%) during that time

Think he's ceded the MVP to Altuve, though.

judge is trying to have something to say about that

I really hope Judge doesn't win. Even with this recent resurgence, his second half stats still pale next to the first half. Barring any major surprises the last 10 games, I'd go Altuve, Ramirez, Trout, then Judge.

i'll never know why you care so much about 2nd half performance, but judge's second half wRC+ is over 125 after today's game, just because it was weirdly partitioned into a really bad stretch and a really hot stretch doesn't make it any less legitimate

Ranger fan here, and I'm ruminating on days yesteryear, right around the Bautista punch and before Rougie Odor's contract, when many homers in the area were proclaiming they wouldn't trade Odor straight up for Altuve. We're talking arguably the best player in baseball versus arguably the worst.

i'll never know why you care so much about 2nd half performance

I think we've argued this before. To me, it's no different than assigning greater leverage to what happens late in the game. (To be fair, Judge is having a phenomenal ninth inning.)

i can't see judge winning in a year where his big slump was highlighted by an extremely well-publicized negative record that he set by like 40 extra games

who'll they go for, the safe amazing second basemen on a playoff team who leads the league in WAR or that guy who did nothing but strike out for what felt like half the season

To me, it's no different than assigning greater leverage to what happens late in the game.

Except a win in April is the same as a win in September. A lead after the fourth inning is not the same as the lead after the ninth.

So, different.

is the same = of equal value

morbs otm

A run in the first inning counts just as much towards the final score as a run in the ninth inning.

A lead in mid-May is not the same as a lead on Oct. 2.

Leverage in the course of a season is just as meaningful as leverage over the course of nine innings.

that's definitely completely wrong though

Then explain how.

I can accept dismissing both as specious--a run is a run and a win is a win--and I can also accept placing value on both. But saying one is meaningful and the other doesn't exist, that makes no sense to me at all.

because runs in a single game and wins over a single season are obviously different functions? the only reason anyone cares about leverage as a statistic is because it's related to observable, statistically significant skill. "season-wide" leverage is a team skill and "team skills" are not relevant over multiple seasons worth of data.

leverage index also takes into account a bunch of other factors that don't equate to a season of baseball. if the only factor was "this guy does better in later innings" then yeah, it'd be pretty meaningless.

you're comparing a season of 162 games to a single game of 9 innings, i don't really know how else to explain that they don't match up

I'm off to watch the Vietnam documentary--I will try to get my head around that, but I still don't see why, in at least a general sense, the two aren't comparable. If you took two players with virtually identical season stats, and the one guy's monster month was April and the other guy's was September, I don't think there's a GM or manager who wouldn't prefer having the September guy. Everyone remember Yaz's finish in 1967; famous Aprils aren't famous for very long.

This did come up in an e-mail I sent to James a few years ago. For what it's worth (not very much, I'm sure, seeing as he's old and cranky and says dumb things about Donald Trump):

I remember we used to have people in the field who would fume about late-inning homers being counted as more important than early-game homers, etc. We just hadn't worked out a coherent way to think about the problem. Eventually we all came around to the concept of "leveraged" situations, a concept with which people are comfortable, so people stopped bitching about game-time performance being given additional weight. It's not unreasonable to think that late-season performance in a pennant race is ALSO leveraged performance, and should be given weight.

you're gonna make me repost that tweet about the nazis aren't you

not all leverage takes place *late* in the game btw

highest leverage, that is

also i thought we were talking about wins, not "a lead"

late-game and late-season "matter" more but it's silly to assign greater weight to them when evaluating players, since performing better or worse during those times is mostly random

and when i say late game i mean high leverage

I agree that late-season performance is probably no more a repeatable skill than clutch hitting at the game level--you could probably find a very occasional player who reliably hits better in September, but with the great majority, it probably fluctuates from season to season. When voting for an MVP, though, I don't think it's unreasonable to take late-season performance into account, anymore that it's unreasonable to remember Carlton Fisk or Bill Mazeroski or Jose Bautista. They didn't win those games single-handedly--stuff happened in the early innings that mattered, that led to what they did--but we remember them most, and give them extra credit.

And just like all high-leverage situations don't happen late in the game, there are inflection points throughout a season. If you face your main divisional rival in a four-game series in June, and both teams are tied, a four-game sweep could change the direction of the season.

I don't think we're going to agree here. The analogy between leverage at the game and seasonal level seems plain as day to me; they're very different to the rest, or most of the rest of you.

no i think that analogy made perfect sense

i just think individual awards should go to the guys who played the best over the course of the season, without respect to leverage. i would need to have the feeling that the attribute i am using to influence my hypothetical vote is one over which the player has some sort of control, can improve at, etc. trying to strip randomness (and sentimentality in general, i guess) out of the equation seems like the right idea to me

if leverage is that important to the MVP, someone should go back over previous award winners and see who played for dominant teams that were far enough ahead of the rest of the league their late-seasons games didn't really matter...and then we should retroactively PUNISH those players

i'm sorry, joe morgan, but we need to talk about your 1975 MVP award. and also your broadcasting career