Mike Trout will play his 1,000th game in the majors Thursday night, an impressive feat considering he’s still only 26. He’s only the 43rd player in MLB history to have crossed the 1,000 game threshold at such a young age, and the only names on that list to have a higher career OPS+ than Trout’s 175 through that point are Ty Cobb (181) and Mickey Mantle (176).
You can keep worse company. And that’s a trend you’ll continually come across as you dive deeper into Trout’s remarkable career. As David Schoenfield pointed out at ESPN earlier this week, Trout has already accumulated more wins above replacement than 74 position players who ended up in baseball’s hall-of-fame. Among the names he’s already surpassed are Yogi Berra, Mike Piazza, and Vladimir Guerrero, who was elected to the hall this January by 92.9 per cent of voters in his second year on the ballot.
And the crazy thing is, Trout appears to be getting better. He’s improved his OPS+ each of the last three seasons, from 173 in 2016, to 187 in 2017, to an otherworldly 219 through his first 74 games of 2018. In the history of the game, there have been only 19 seasons in which a player achieved an OPS+ of 219 or higher. Babe Ruth has six of them; Barry Bonds had four; Ted Williams had two. Among those who did it only once: Mantle, Lou Gehrig, and Rogers Hornsby. We’re dealing with the best to ever play the game.
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A season like that is also something that hasn’t happened since 2004, when Bonds capped a remarkable run of putting up a 231 OPS+ or higher four seasons in a row. Of course, his career numbers will always be viewed with some skepticism due to his links to the use of performance enhancing drugs, particularly during the BALCO scandal which played out exactly when Bonds was putting up those historic seasons.
Before Bonds, no one had put up such a strong OPS+ season since 1957, when Mantle (221) and Williams (233) finished one-two in MVP voting. Outside of Williams’ great campaign in 1941, when he put up a 235 OPS+, you have to go all the way back to 1927 to find a similar season, which is when Ruth put up 225 and Gehrig put up 220.
This is all to say, Trout is the first player not tainted by a steroid scandal to have a season this strong since the 50s. And he’s one of only six players to do it since 1926. When you consider how much more demanding today’s game is, with pitchers throwing harder than ever with the benefit of far more advanced scouting, Trout putting up the season he is looks even more impressive.
Any way you slice it, we are watching one of the best hitters to ever play the game and a likely hall-of-famer. Just look at this chart from Baseball Savant which colour codes how well a player’s stats rank against the rest of his league.
Mike Trout’s batting stats, courtesy of Baseball Savant.
That’s a lot of red! Trout has been one of the best, most consistent hitters in baseball for seven seasons running. At this rate, it will take an injury or a momentous drop off in his production for Trout to not win his third MVP award. And as he continues to pile up season after season of elite numbers, he further establishes himself as one of the best to ever play. And unquestionably one of the best through 1,000 games.
