Report: Angels, Mike Trout Finalizing 12-Year, $430+ Million Extension for Largest Contract in Pro Sports
@EasyAce
@Machiavelli And he's worth every nickel plus.
I did a tabulation I've been experimenting with called real batting average. (RBA.) The traditional batting average's number one flaw is that it doesn't measure
everything you do at the plate, it counts all hits as equal (and all hits are
not equal) and measures them by official at-bats only, not total plate appearances. (Maybe they should call the traditional batting average a hitting average and not a true
batting average?) And, on-base percentage (a better way to measure a hitter than traditional batting average, anyway) is flawed slightly because it, too, considers only official at-bats and not total plate appearances. So, since Trout is so often compared not to his contemporaries but to the best of the best post-World War II Hall of Famers, I added total bases (you get one for a single, two for a double, three for a triple, four for a homer), walks, and sacrifices (they
should count, since you're doing what the late broadcaster Bob Murphy---the only announcer in baseball I ever heard put it this way---called building runs; or, in the case of a sacrifice fly, scoring them), then divided by total plate appearances:
TB + BB + SAC / PA
The
average RBA by that formula among all the Hall of Famers who played the majority of their careers in the post-World War II/post-integration/night ball era is .531.
The highest RBA among them is Ted Williams, with a .708. The other Hall of Famers with RBAs of .600 or better: Chipper Jones (.600), Mike Schmidt (.600), Hank Aaron (.603), Jeff Bagwell (.606), Willie Mays (.611), Stan Musial (.615), Ralph Kiner (.620), Jim Thome (.629), Frank Thomas (.629), and Mickey Mantle (.636). (Jones, Schmidt, Mays, and Mantle, of course, played two of the toughest field positions in the game; between them, Schmidt was the far better defensive third baseman than Jones, and Mays and Mantle were about equal as defensive center fielders, though you wonder how Mantle's defensive statistics would really have shaken out without all those leg injuries.)
[Joe DiMaggio would have played the majority of his career pre-integration/night ball if he hadn't lost three seasons to military service. He comes out as playing exactly one more season post-World War II than pre-service, so I didn't include him in the survey, but for the record his RBA is .619. He might have come out higher except for costing himself a lot of home runs because of (stop me if this sounds familiar to you when talking about a lot of
today's players) his insistence that the only "legitimate" hitting was pull hitting. (Once, when someone suggested to him that he might have some more home runs and drive in some more runs if he thought about going with the pitch on the outer region of the plate and aiming for the fabled Yankee Stadium short porch in right field, DiMaggio dismissed it with, "I could p@ss them over that wall. That's not hitting.")]
Mike Trout also plays one of the three toughest field positions in the game. (I'd have to say catching qualifies, which is why you won't see any postwar/post-integration/night-ball Hall of Fame catchers with RBAs above the average or at .600 or better: the highest RBA among them is Mike Piazza's .590, but he wasn't a great defensive catcher. Yogi Berra's .526 is below the average for the Hall of Fame catchers and Johnny Bench's .534 is
just below the HOF average overall, but Berra was the greatest all-around catcher who's probably the most underrated defensive and pitcher-handling catcher with Bench his extremely close second. The lowest RBA among the HOF catcher: Ivan Rodriguez, .494.) And he can say that 43 percent of his lifetime hits have gone for extra bases.
Trout has an RBA through the end of last season of---wait for it---.698.
.698.
That's higher than
every .600+ RBA postwar/post-integration/night-ball era Hall of Famer by a very wide margin and only ten points shy of Ted Williams's mark. It's also far higher than Bryce Harper's .587 and Manny Machado's .527, calculated by the same formula. (In case you were wondering, you can also look up how often a player took extra bases on followup knocks---and Trout's done it 57 percent of the time he's been on base.)
If the Angels really are going to make Trout an Angel for life, good for them. They've got the money. Now, all they have to do is finish building a team the best player in baseball and in Angel history can be proud of.
