Mike Trout may just be the biggest name in baseball. When he burst on the scene with his MVP-caliber 2012 campaign, the imaginations of the entire baseball world were set ablaze. Trout was hailed by many as the second coming of Mickey Mantle himself, and that assessment wasn’t that far off. For batters through their age 21 seasons, BaseballReference lists Mantle as Trout’s second most comparable player behind Frank Robinson. The sky is the limit for Mike Trout. For two years, Trout set the baseball diamond on fire, to the point where there was a very good argument to be made that he should have been the MVP over the first Triple Crown winner since Carl Yastrzemski.
Then this season happened. Besides a bit of a blip in the month of May, the first half of the year was a more than productive one for the young superstar. A whopping .310/.400/.606 line and 22 homers (184 wRC+) worth of productivity to be precise. Naturally, Trout started the All-Star game and was named the game MVP. Everything was coming up Milhouse for Mike Trout.
Or was it? Let’s look at that triple slash again; .310/.400/.606. In the previous two seasons, Trout has posted batting averages over .320. Batting averages, of course, are nowhere near accurate measures of a player’s hitting, but it was undeniable that Trout was getting hits at slightly less frequent rate. His OBP for 2013, also, was a .432 mark. Not only was Trout hitting less often, he was walking less often. The major spike in slugging is what truly tells the story. Trout was slugging out of his mind, way over his career high. That was concurrent with a spike in K% (23.3% in the first half vs. 19.0% in 2013), and it tells the whole story. Trout had decided to swing big. Aim for the fences, and live with the strikeouts and lack of walks (13.0% vs. 15.4% in 2013). For a while, it worked beautifully. Trout hit the snot out of the ball en route to the All-Star Game. However, ever since then he’s fallen off dramatically.
That’s not to say that Mike Trout has been a “bad player” since his shining moment in Minneapolis. Since the All-Star break, Trout’s posted a 124 wRC+. That’s 24 points over league average, and nothing to sneeze at per se. But what exactly does a 124 wRC+ look like in 2014 (wRC+ is relative to league average, so a 124 in 2014 is different from a 124 in 2013)? Coming into Tuesday’s games, Anthony Rendon and Melky Cabrera are rocking 124 marks. Rendon and Melky have both been fantastic this year. They currently own .352 and .354 wOBA scores, respectively. In the second half, Trout is at .342.
For reference at how astonishing that is, last year had a .423 wOBA. It’s worth noting, of course, that pitching this year has been better than it ever has in a long, long time. Yet if we look at this from a league-adjusted perspective, Trout had a 177 wRC+ last year. Trout is not the same hitter as Moss and Frazier; he’s miles ahead of them. The only hitter with a higher wRC+ last year was Miguel Cabrera.
So, this all begs the question; “What in the world is wrong with Mike Trout?” It’s worth looking first to see if Trout has experience similar drop-offs in his previous two full seasons in the bigs. It’s certainly not the case in his 2013 season, where his wRC+ actually increased nineteen points. It also increased in 2012, however only by two points. Clearly, Trout isn’t naturally the kind of player who increases his production or decreases his production at some point in the year, a la Matt Holliday’s usual second half explosions.
This leads us to the second possible explanation. Something has fundamentally shifted in the way a standard-issue Mike Trout plate appearance happens. Is Trout hiding an injury? That’s unlikely, especially since the problem has persisted over such an extended period of time.
Then at least one of these two things is changing to an extreme; Trout’s approach, and the pitcher’s approach. We know for a fact that at the start of the season, Trout had started to swing for the fences more frequently. We already ran through the signs of that (higher K%, higher slugging, more homers). It stands to reason that the rest of the league took note of that as well. Trout is now swinging harder and bigger, so why not abuse that?
Pitchers have done precisely that. The three charts below (these charts and all subsequent ones are from the fabulous Pitch F/x tool BrooksBaseball) display Trout’s swing-and-miss tendencies over the course of his career. The first is from his cup of coffee in the 2011 season to the end of the 2013 season. The second is from the start of 2014 until the All-Star break, and then from the All-Star break to Monday’s game. From the first chart, we can see that Trout really started developing issues with non-fastballs last year. His whiff percentage against breaking and off-speed stuff was consistently higher than it was against fastballs. He also had this problem in 2012 to an extent, but it wasn’t as pronounced.
Then the first half of 2014 happened. We know that Trout was something of a different hitter at that point, and pitchers hadn’t caught on. He was actually less susceptible to off-speed offerings… until the first half of July. In those games his whiff rate against off-speed pitched skyrocketed. This seems to somewhat be a result of small sample sizes, as that rate stabilized somewhat once Trout returned from the break. Yet it only stabilized by three points. For reference, below is Trout’s full chart for all of 2014. It’s not very pretty.
Ever since July, Trout’s been trending in the wrong direction in all three categories. It’s almost definitely because scouts and pitchers around the league recognized his new approach at the plate, and are attacking him accordingly. Trout has always feasted on fastballs, and had a decent eye. The best way to wreck a dead red fastball killer is throw him a really good changeup or breaking ball, and pitchers have done exactly that. The next chart displays how pitchers have approached Trout over the course of the season.
Besides a bump in breaking balls in June, nothing really changed over the course of the first half. Pitchers threw him the same stuff, and Trout punished them for doing so. Midway through July, as the earlier charts show, the league woke up. At first they increased how many changes he saw, and now the flavor of the month is curveballs. And because Trout is now even more on his heels in terms of what’s coming to him, he’s whiffing even more at everything. Even fastballs.
Think for a second, where is Mike Trout’s happy zone? Both pitch f/x and highlight reels will show you that if you throw him fastballs middle or down, there’s a good chance he’s going to hurt you. Below are charts that show where in the zone he has seen fastballs this season, before and after the break. The major shift, of course, is that pitchers are now going higher and further in. That already gives him less to drive, but given the increase in breaking balls Trout doesn’t seem to know what’s coming. That’s made his reaction to off-speed stuff even worse, as the above data shows. He thinks he’s finally got a fastball he can kill, and then he’s out in front of it.
Was Mike Trout always going to be the 10 WAR player he was the last two years? Of course not. That’s a tall order for anyone, even if they are the next Mickey Mantle. Baseball is a game of adjustments, and Trout decided to adjust more towards the long ball. For a while it really, really worked. Now the league has adjusted to him, and he’s getting killed. Of course, he’s still been 24 points above league average. That’s just how freakishly good he is. He’s still in the conversation for MVP, and may end up winning it. Yet it will be a sputter to the finish line, not a charge, for Mike Trout.
It remains to be seen whether Trout can adjust again, or if these new offerings will be the end of his incredible prowess with the bat. I wouldn’t bet against Mike Trout. The kid is too naturally talented. For what it’s worth, in the last two weeks Trout’s hitting .302/.338/.528. There may be a glimmer of hope yet.
Yet we’ve seen incredible prospects crash and burn before. Will Trout fade away? Probably not. But it’s something worth watching.
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