Greater career - Mike Trout or Bryce Harper?

One follow-up on Bobby Abreu, then Trout/Harper can have their thread back.

In the history of baseball, there are two players who have played in 150 games or more for 13 consecutive seasons:

Willie Mays
Bobby Abreu (Happy 45th Birthday)

Pete Rose, Cal Ripken Jr., and Rafael Palmeiro likely would have matched if streaks were not interrupted by strikes.

— Chris Bodig ⚾ (@cooperstowncred) March 11, 2019

I know that's one of those specious benchmarks with cherry-picked parameters (if you drop it to 145 games, Aaron hits 16 consecutive seasons), but who would ever come up with Abreu as one of the two?

more hot bobby abreu content

Bobby Abreu has been selected as the 2019 Toyota Phillies Wall of Fame inductee!

He will be inducted on Saturday, August 3, as part of Toyota Alumni Weekend. pic.twitter.com/TthmZAbIpf

— Philadelphia Phillies (@Phillies) March 20, 2019

brb - have to go buy a Toyota

In the liner notes to one of the Pavement CD reissues, Stephen Malkamus references Bobby Abreyu's scream at the 2005 HR derby

I'm sure most of you are aware of this, but I'd be a little cautious about Harper's great start. April is far and away his best month historically: .310/.438/.627. No other month is even close.

MLB leaders in OPS as of this morning:

1. Harper - 1.479
2. Trout - 1.476

trout is having an insanely hot start

considering the lineup around him, i'm not sure why anyone ever throws him a strike

Trout's gonna benefit in the counting stats department by being paired with Pujols and Trumbo for the foreseeable future..
― johnathan lee riche$ (mayor jingleberries), Tuesday, July 10, 2012 2:01 PM (six years ago)

At the time, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

trumbo we believed in u

Just to jump the gun by several miles...If Trout were to win MVP unanimously this year, he'd move ahead of these players in MVP Award Shares: A-Rod, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Aaron, Mantle, Mays. (And MVP votes were easier to come by in a smaller league...DiMaggio did lose time to the war, and Gehrig's a separate thing because of an erratic MVP structure pre-1931.)

I'm sure most of you are aware of this, but I'd be a little cautious about Harper's great start. April is far and away his best month historically: .310/.438/.627. No other month is even close.

― clemenza, Tuesday, April 2, 2019 7:58 PM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

welp

Trout's 2019 OPS by monthly splits:

March/April - 1.052
May - 1.032
June - 1.236

Harper:

March/April - .878
May - .811
June - .718

Harper's K rate is noticeably higher, which i guess could be attributable to scuffling under early "new contract" pressure but he's on pace for 200+, which is maybe alarming for a guy who only twice before just barely exceeded averaging one K per game (and in some seasons was well below that).

most alarmed by the lack of power. the ball is juiced, he plays in a bandbox and he's three homers behind tommy la stella

the stats have his defense as considerably better than last year or the overall WAR might be embarrassing

wonder if his defense is better bc they've got him exclusively playing RF vs last season when Washington stuck him in center 1/3rd of the time.

Both these dudes reinforcing some opinions today

My golfing friend didn't play tonight because he's at the Jays game; Trout's hit two HR, one a grand slam.

Right now, Harper isn't even in the WAR team top 10 headshots on the 2019 Phillies Baseball Reference page.

That homer Trout hit the night before and that rookie hit were absolute bombs the night before in Toronto.

I still think it's funny that, for me--whether fair or not--the most devastating nickname ever was Steinbrenner playing off of Reggie and calling Winfield "Mr. May," and Harper comes along and basically lays claim to "Mr. April."

it appears that harper has started all but one of the phillies' 73 games (he was a pinch hitter in one game last week). which might not be the most productive use of a guy who's scuffling

Trout finished 3-6 tonight with the 2 HR and 7 RBI. in his worst season he won the MVP award.

mike trout is hitting .420 in 69 career at-bats with the bases loaded

this is not a joke

101 rbis in those 69 AB....

I was checking Bryce’s B-Ref page and he’s got that WAR up to 2.6, which means barring some absurd hot streak (not an impossibility obv) he’ll finish outside the NL top ten again. He only finished in the top ten once, in his MVP season. fWAR may tell a different tale but idk.

Trout is presently at 8.1, finally ahead of Cody for the MLB lead.

He's having a great August--8 HR, .678 SLB--and he picked the perfect time to get hot, but yeah, he'd dug himself such a hole in the spring, he'll have to stay hot to put up a 4.0-5.0 WAR season. I'm not sure you'd even call him overrated anymore, because I doubt there are many writers left who view him as one of the best players in the game. Overpaid, definitely.

Sorry he’s only at 2.4 bWAR!

At $9M/win on the open market (or thereabouts), he's not overpaid. Maybe on the back end of the contract he will be, but based on AAV, he's worth the money.

As a fan you probably expect more from the player who signed the biggest contract in baseball history (total value) (at the time), but that's a different story.

have to go with trout

i feel like trout has the advantage

Trout has arguably had the better start to his career

If I had to pick one over the other, though. I don’t know.

This has now become a clowning-around thread.

At $9M/win on the open market (or thereabouts), he's not overpaid.

I'm actually about halfway through Baseball Prospectus's book Between the Numbers, and there's a chapter on that. (The book came out 10+ years ago, but it delves into basic issues still debated today.) If you take one number to measure that, yes; a 5 WAR x $9M/win makes him worth considerably more than the $11M he's getting this year--much more than the $27M a year he'll be getting for the next decade, even. But they provided three or four ways to approach that. He's worth the money in years like this one, where the Phillies are in the middle of a playoff race and probably going to end up in that 85-90 win window. If they're below that, though, or safely above it, that $9M figure drops appreciably. And whether he's worth it compared to other free-agents and upper-echelon (my preferred term for the ubiquitous and suddenly annoying "elite") players, another way they measure that, I think that's more open to debate. Skip forward to next year and assume he puts up 6.0 WAR. I have to believe that any team spending wisely and getting a little bit of luck (or at least avoiding bad luck) could generate a lot more than 6 WAR with $27 million.

Or you could be the Toronto Blue Jays, paying $45M right now to Troy Tulowitzki, Russell Martin, and Kendrys Morales, about 40% of their current payroll. Give me Bryce Harper for $27M!

Unless Trout ups his BB% of his HR rate or Harper gets injured, I strongly suspect that this is going to be Harper from here on out

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Thursday, September 17, 2015 8:38 AM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

what lottery tickets should I buy?

Kind of embarrassing to see Trout being measured more against Bellinger and Yelich these days.

Harper just mashed one oppo vs Porcello into the Monster seats

Leaning Trout.

I wonder what we're going to think about the Harper and Machado contracts five years from now?

good question

Similar Batters through 30
Barry Bonds (934.5)

aight we just need to get him some cream and some clear and make the next decade exciting

seeing this pop up made me think of Trout as a Mantle figure if the injuries keep piling up (inner circle Hall of Famer but still a what if) but Harper is no Willie.

per similar batters, though, Duke Snider is a strong comparison. Hopefully the aging curve is kinder to Harper.