We have all forced the comparison.
Having witnessed the precedent-defying start to Mike Trout’s major league career, all of us who write about baseball have tried to find a suitable rival for the game’s best player. For seasons one and two of Trout’s career, Miguel Cabrera served as his foil, winning consecutive MVP awards and a Triple Crown even as we rallied for Trout. In 2015 Bryce Harper made his challenge, winning an MVP and surviving a mid-season throttling by Jonathan Papelbon to claim the NL MVP. A lot of us assumed that this was Harper’s ascendency, but the Nationals outfielder followed up that breakout performance with a .243 batting average in 2016, and an injury-plagued 2017. Jose Altuve and Josh Donaldson have snuck MVP trophies under Trout’s watch, while Giancarlo Stanton and Kris Bryant both had years where they were the best players in the NL. But none of those players, great as they are, have quite drawn parallel to Mike Trout’s greatness. None of them have been adequate barroom challenges to Trout’s stake as the best player in baseball.
But we have - finally - a legitimate rival. Mookie Betts has distanced himself from the rest of the pack, and now stands as the one legitimate counter to Trout’s dominance. Mookie Betts is, just maybe,the best player in baseball.
* * *
Let’s start with the bowling.
I have written about bowling a fair bit about bowling on this site, and I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking I have any particular skill at the game. I’ve bowled a fair bit, and I’ve watched a few good bowlers bowl, but my own abilities are very limited.
But I know enough about the game to know that to be really good at bowling demands a combination of divergent skills, the least important being strength. You do not have to be ‘strong’ to be a decent bowler, and very few bowlers look classically strong. Go turn on the television at 7:00 am on a Sunday and check out the bowlers: you’ll see big guys and you will see rail-thin guys, but you won’t see jacked up, muscled men, because strength isn’t a central component to the sport.
What is important is a capacity to repeat a motion, over and over again. What’s important is the ability to repeat a motion and adjust that motion, ever so slightly. That’s the part where I failed as a bowler: I am inclined towards repetition, but I have little patience for ever-so-slight adjustments. I am not good at the finer details: I like to throw the damned ball and watch the pins pop.
And what is most important is having a mind that can deal with the tedium of repetition, and the capacity to shut out all external distraction and focus on process.
Mookie Betts has bowled ten 300 games. Approximately ten…he can’t remember the exact number. The most recent one occurred this offseason, during the World Series of bowling.
I’m sure I’ve made this point before, but I think that Betts’ ability to be an elite enough bowler to throw a perfect game in between baseball seasons speaks volumes about why he is such a magnificent player.
A baseball season is a grind. That is the most clichéd way to talk about the season, but it’s also the most accurate. A single game has about eight minutes of action, spread out over four hours. A major league player will endure 162 of those games, plus twenty pre-season games, and however many postseason games their team is lucky enough to play in. For those eight minutes of action, they will endure endless hours of practice, and hours of watching video, and hours of sitting in the clubhouse doing absolutely nothing. They will do this daily for seven or eight months, with very few breaks.
A football season, in contrast, has a natural sequence of ebbs and flows: a player’s focus will rise as the game approaches, and then ebb at it’s end. A baseball player gets no rise or ebb in the tides of their lives: they exist on a maddeningly calm sea.
There is a mental challenge that is unique to baseball, one that I haven’t adequately conveyed, and different players cope with it differently. Some players launch themselves full-force into those eight minutes of action: Yasiel Puig comes to mind in this regard. Some players clown around and have fun. David Ortiz had fun in the dugout. Hanley Ramirez does this: he jokes with everyone who reaches first base. Mike Trout is like this.
Some players try to cope with the tedium by adopting an uprightness of character, by being ‘professional.’ These are the guys who fixate on the unwritten ‘rules.’ Some guys get into patterns: they embrace the consistency of ritual. Think Wade Boggs eating chicken every day.
Mookie doesn’t do any of that. Or, he seems to do all of that…he will laugh in the dugout or celebrate a homer or get frustrated…but none of that seems to be his default temperament on the field. His default mode seems quiet, and internal: he plays as within himself as any player I’ve ever watched for a long period of time.
Betts has, I think, a bowler’s mind. Bowling is not a team sport: no one can raise or lower your score except yourself. It is a game that is entirely your own: there is no use knowing what the guy next to you is doing, because their strategy and execution is exclusively they’re own. All you have is yourself. All you can improve is yourself.
He is closer in kin to players like Williams and Hornsby. He plays with a focus that is inward, but he isn’t monomaniacal about it. Hornsby and Williams were indifferent to everything about baseball except hitting; Mookie Betts is a superb defensive outfielder and a gifted baserunner. Williams and Hornsby were jerks; Mookie has trouble getting booed in the Bronx.
When Betts came up, I remember reading an article that mentioned his bowling ability. The detail was used as color; as a little factoid to flush out the story of a decent prospect. What does bowling matter, after all? It’s the default sport of middle-aged men. It’s not anything to take seriously.
Well, I did take it seriously. When I read that Betts was a good bowler, I thought: this one’s going to turn out to be a good player. I thought that some part would transfer, that some part would show, and I’ve followed Betts’ career trying to see that part. I think I have seen it, and this is my attempt to explain it to you all.
I appreciate your tolerance.
* * *
Getting back to our main thesis.
Mike Trout’s greatness has always felt impenetrable because he was so young when he staked his claim as the game’s best player, and because he was so good at everything you could do on a baseball diamond. That first year of Trout’s was a fever dream: here’s a twenty-year old kid who can hit .320 with power, who’s fast enough to paces the league in stolen bases, and who makes a habit of robbing opponent of home runs by crashing the centerfield wall. Where are you going to better this guy? By what dimension of skill can you gain any kind of traction?
This is the reason that our expectations of Bryce Harper were so flawed: he is a year younger than Trout, and he might one day have stretches where he is a better hitter than Trout. But as a defensive player and a baserunner, he will always lag behind the Angels centerfielder. And this gets us off the hook with the magnificent Jose Altuve. The Houston second baseman won his MVP award in his Age-27 season last year…we won’t see Trout’s Age-27 season until 2019. Altuve’s career is out ahead of Trout: we are seeing his likely peak against Trout’s pre-peak seasons.
Age is the first area where Mookie presents a real challenge to Trout. Betts is a year younger than Trout (and a week older than Bryce Harper), which means that he is, at least theoretically, a year further from the peak of his abilities. Trout has room to grow as a player (and he has shown a particularly Darwinian inclination towards adaption throughout the early stages of his career), but Mookie’s extra year gives him a little more room for growth.
And Mookie’s skills are more diverse than Trout’s. Mike Trout is a good defensive player, but aside from his spectacular rookie season, he’s never performed like an absolutely elite defender. That’s an exceptionally high bar to hold anyone to, of course, but Mookie Betts happens to be anexceptional defensive player: he has won consecutive Gold Gloves covering one of the toughest right fields in the game, and every metric we have at our disposal suggests that he is saving the Red Sox a lot of runs on defense.
And while Mike Trout is a brilliant baserunner, Mookie Betts has been a little more brilliant over the last couple seasons: Betts finished fourth in FanGraphs’ Baserunning Runs last year (behind Buxton, Hamilton, and Gordon). He finished first in 2016, ahead of…who else? Mike Trout.
The other gap in their respective performance…the gap that interests me the most…is their gap in walk and strikeout rates.
Bill once wrote that George Sisler was the most compelling challenger to Lou Gehrig’s status as the greatest peak first baseman of all-time, because Sisler was the one first basemen whose game was different than Gehrig’s. Jimmie Foxx and Willie McCovey and Johnny Mize all had tremendous peak seasons, but they were all great in the same ways that Gehrig was great: they were trying to surpass Gehrig playing Gehrig’s game. Sisler was a compelling challenge to Gehrig because he was different: he didn’t mash homers, but he hit for much better averages, was a good defensive player, and ran the bases well. He wasn’t better than Gehrig, but the comparison was tougher because the skills weren’t directly comparable.
The same can be said about Trout and Betts. Trout is a better player than anyone else trying to play his game, but Mookie Betts doesn’t really play Trout’s game. Betts has good power, but it is unlikely that he will develop as a power hitter in the same way that Trout has. His ceiling as a power hitter isn’t the same ceiling that Trout has.
Mike Trout’s walk and strikeout percentages look like mostly sluggardly sluggers in our era:
|
Year
|
BB%
|
K%
|
|
2016
|
17.0
|
20.1
|
|
2017
|
18.5
|
17.8
|
|
2018
|
18.2
|
18.2
|
Trout walks a little under 20% of the time, and he strikes out a little under 20% of the time. He is a Three-True-Outcomes slugger, living in a Three-True-Outcomes era.
Betts isn’t the same kind of hitter. Betts doesn’t walk as much as Trout does, but he also doesn’t strike out as frequently:
|
Year
|
BB%
|
K%
|
|
2016
|
6.7
|
11.0
|
|
2017
|
10.8
|
11.1
|
|
2018
|
10.5
|
10.5
|
Betts is about half-a-Trout in both categories…he draws half the walks and gets half the punchouts. Incidentally, Trout is my new favorite unit of measure.
It will be interesting to how this difference plays out going forward. Who has more room to grow as a hitter, the hitter who matches the trends of his era or the hitter who bucks those trends? Who ages better? Where do their skills develop, and where do they deteriorate? And who will look like the better player when we’ve finally sorted through the reams of data about hit trajectories and win probabilities and adjustments for every context imaginable? If Trout is the best by WAR, which one will be the best by whatever comes after WAR?
I don’t know the answer. All I know is that Mike Trout, the absolute best player in baseball, finally has a compelling rival to his historic career.
Don’t look back, Mike. Mookie might be gaining on you.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.