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10 Degrees: Underappreciated Mike Trout is as good as ever

Quietly, dutifully, typically, Mike Trout is being Mike Trout. Because his team is no good, because shinier new things have distracted us or maybe just because Trout fatigue is a real thing, we’re (again) taking for granted that one of the great talents ever to play baseball is (again) doing everything that makes him so great.

Mike Trout continues to still fly under the radar. (Getty Images)
Mike Trout continues to still fly under the radar. (Getty Images)

Trout’s line this season is .312/.408/.556, which for the uninitiated or unfamiliar is extraordinarily good. Thing is, it’s incredibly characteristic of Trout, to the point that the amazing grows benign. Over Trout’s first four full seasons, he put up a weighted on-base-plus slugging of at least 168, or 68 percent greater than league average. Nobody in history before him had four consecutive 168-or-better OPS+ seasons from ages 20-23. If he does it again this season – Trout’s current line translates to a 174 – he’ll join one player to have done it ages 21-24: Ty Cobb.

How a former MVP winds up completely underappreciated is beyond comprehension, and it’s enough to headline a 10 Degrees of the similarly unrecognized. Here is a half-decade of beyond-superlative play from a kid who still can’t rent a car without having to pay extra, and it garners the same sort of reaction as your neighbor’s potato salad at the Memorial Day barbecue: Hmmmm, that’s pretty good. No. I’m sorry. To compare …

1. Mike Trout to mayo-based mediocrity is not just an insult to the potato salad – pesto, people, pesto – but a dereliction to duty as a baseball fan. It’s one thing to lose sight of the Angels after the Garrett Richards and Andrew Heaney injuries buried them. It’s another to blame their late-night West Coast games. It’s something different altogether to miss the little evolutions in Trout’s games that seem to happen every year.

This season, it’s the winnowing of Trout’s tendency to strike out, something that didn’t manage to take away from his excellence but was threatening to get to a point where it might. After climbing to 26.1 percent in 2014, Trout’s strikeout rate dipped to 23.2 percent last year. This season, it’s at an even 20 percent, and the change is much because of a newfound ability.

Trout is making contact on nearly 84 percent of his swings. His best seasons in the past were around 82 percent. And it’s not just that he’s hitting more pitches. Trout is hitting the right pitches. Brooks Baseball divides the hitting zone into 25 areas. Of those, the most delectable pitches tend to come in the middle and lower-middle zones. Trout has seen 457 pitches there this season and swung and missed at just 19 – a 4.1 percent whiff rate.

Last year, on such pitches, Trout was at 6.4 percent. And in 2013, his best offensive season, 6.1 percent. Just when it seems like Trout can’t get any better, he does. It’s the hallmark of true greatness, something …

Clayton Kershaw is on pace to shatter the strikeout-to-walk ratio. (Getty Images)
Clayton Kershaw is on pace to shatter the strikeout-to-walk ratio. (Getty Images)

2. Clayton Kershaw

embodies more than anyone in baseball, even Trout. The height of Kershaw’s powers seemed to apex two years ago, when he won the National League MVP award. Then last year he struck out more than 300 and led the league in innings pitched. And now, in his first 11 starts, Kershaw has struck out 105, walked five and … hold on a second. A 105-to-5 strikeout-to-walk ratio? That doesn’t sound real. Only it is, as are all of the following:

  • Kershaw is averaging 7.88 innings per start. The last starter to do that was Dwight Gooden in 1985.

  • In seven of Kershaw’s last eight starts, he has struck out at least 10 batters. In the eighth, he threw a two-hit shutout.

  • Kershaw has thrown at least 70 strikes in his last nine starts. David Price went an amazing 19 straight starts in 2014 with 70-plus strikes. At least Kershaw still has goals.

Here’s a fun one: Kershaw vs. Peak Pedro Martinez.

Kershaw, 2014-16                               Pedro, 1999-2001

IP: 517.2                                              IP: 547

H: 353                                                 H: 372

ER: 120                                               ER: 133

R: 109                                                  R: 122

BB: 78                                                 BB: 94

K: 645                                                  K: 760

HR: 28                                                 HR: 31

ERA: 1.90                                            ERA: 2.01

Holy mother of pitching duels. Peak Pedro is arguably – and you can make a really good argument – one of the greatest runs in pitching history, and Kershaw present stacks up pretty well against him. Pedro’s numbers came in five more starts than Kershaw has, so we’ll revisit it in a month to see how it stacks up.

In the meantime, there will be more nuggets of delight on Kershaw, starting this Wednesday in Tim Brown’s column and in assorted other places around the Internet. In the meantime, a little coolness from …

3. Rich Hill should tide you over. You remember Rich Hill, right? Started four games last year? Parlayed that into a one-year, $6 million contract with Oakland? And now may well be the hottest commodity on the trade market come July? That Rich Hill? If not, acquaint yourselves thusly:

Only one starting pitcher in the AL owns a better ERA than Rich Hill. (AP Photo)
Only one starting pitcher in the AL owns a better ERA than Rich Hill. (AP Photo)

Right now, only one starting pitcher in the AL owns a better ERA than Rich Hill. Right now, only two starting pitchers in the AL own a better strikeout rate than Rich Hill. Right now, only one starting pitcher in either league owns a better home run rate than Rich Hill.

Yes, a 36-year-old who spins curveballs on more than 40 percent of his pitches is among the class of the game. And it’s a beautiful thing to witness, not just because he was cast off in 2010 to LOOGYdom like he had greyscale and was on his way to Valyria but because his ascent back to starting is unlike anything baseball has seen. We should appreciate Hill because of how different he is, whereas with …

4. Johnny Cueto we should be thankful for his sameness. Remember the fear this offseason over Cueto’s rough two-month stint with Kansas City that preceded an up-and-down postseason? In hindsight, the ups overwhelmed the downs, and so long as Cueto’s questionable elbow continues to hold, he may well opt out of his six-year, $130 million deal after next season and see if the market holds even greater riches.

Johnny Cueto has been fantastic for the Giants this season. (AP Photo)
Johnny Cueto has been fantastic for the Giants this season. (AP Photo)

Because Johnny Cueto, San Francisco Giant, has been magnificent. Consider this: He has thrown one-third of an inning more for the Giants than he did the Royals during the regular season last year. Cueto has allowed 32 fewer hits, 22 fewer runs, seven fewer home runs and three fewer walks, with 16 more strikeouts. This is the Cueto who for so many years turned Great American Ball Park’s run-scoring tendencies inert. Stick him in AT&T Park, a notorious run squelcher, and he was bound to shine.

Cueto is on pace to exceed 200 innings, and that consistency is part of what makes him so valuable. Whatever his weight, whatever his motivation, whatever the status of his in-bed selfies, Cueto will show up on the mound. There is value in that knowledge, and while we can’t yet assign it to …

5. Steven Wright, things are at the point where we no longer can ignore what he’s doing. Because, well, he does this.

Did you … I mean … I just …

Look, very little in life can render me speechless. That, though. That seems to defy physics. That is not a pitch. That is a creature. That is a beast. If Wright could make his knuckleball do that every time, we’d have to start calling it a slinker, because it starts tilting down and in like a slider, then abruptly dips down and away like a sinker. Pitches that change direction once are tough enough to hit. Ones that dart in and away is meant for wiffle balls and Looney Tunes.

Wright is 31 years old, and after his complete game Monday, he owns the sixth-best ERA in the AL. Only Chris Sale is averaging more innings per start than Wright in the league. Tim Wakefield didn’t start to harness his knuckleball until he was 28. R.A. Dickey gained control at 35. Wright is not too old to make a career of this, and if he does, what a great testament to the power of the knuckleball it will be. There is no better last-ditch effort, and why more fringy pitchers don’t try is a question without a good answer. It’s not easy to fulfill promise at a young age, though you’d be hard pressed to convince …

6. Xander Bogaerts that’s true. Bogaerts will play all of this season at 23 years old, and right now, he’s hitting a ho-hum .354. Here is the list of 23-year-olds ever to finish with a batting average that high: Albert Pujols, Ted Williams, Arky Vaughan, Harry Rice, Al Simmons, Jim Bottomley, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb. In other words, five Hall of Famers, one will-be Hall of Famer, one should-be Hall of Famer and Harry Rice.

Xander Bogaerts is one of the best young players in baseball. (Getty Images)
Xander Bogaerts is one of the best young players in baseball. (Getty Images)

Bogaerts isn’t some fly-by-night marvel. He nearly won the AL batting crown last season. And he has cut his strikeouts by nearly 50 percent this season, bumped his walk rate and started hitting for power. If you wanted to call Bogaerts one of the 10 best everyday players in the game right now, it would be tough to argue.

Granted, there are a lot of underappreciated players who didn’t make this list. Daniel Murphy and his near-.400 average? Yup. Manny Machado and his AL MVP-type start? Uh-huh. Ben Zobrist and Victor Martinez and Ryan Braun, all hitting above .345? Yup. And don’t forget Gregory Polanco and Nick Castellanos and Francisco Lindor and Jake Lamb on the hitting side, with Noah Syndergaard and Cole Hamels and Drew Pomeranz and Andrew Miller and Roberto Osuna on the mound. There are plenty of others, of course, but this needn’t drag on any longer than it should, and we wouldn’t want to short shrift the sort of season …

7. Marcell Ozuna is having, because considering where he was last year, it’s mighty spectacular. Ozuna’s breakout season comes with a couple caveats, one good and one bad, so enjoy these grains of salt with his .339/.386/.589 line.

The good: When the Marlins summoned Ozuna to the big leagues in 2013, he had logged all of 47 plate appearances above Class A. That’s not enough, especially for a player as raw as Ozuna was. He had not shown the requisite skills to match his otherworldly tools, but those tools were so loud the Marlins chose not to ignore them. The problem: He wasn’t ready, and the previous three years served as a journey to get him to the place where he was ready to exploit his talent.

The bad: Nearly all of Ozuna’s peripherals are the same as in previous years. He’s walking a little more, striking out a little less, but all in all, pretty similar. The big difference: His batting average on balls in play is .404, and that’s without a seemingly huge change in batted-ball speed. While he has been more consistent in 2016 than in 2015, the change doesn’t explain the 75 or so points in career BABIP.

The other number to leap is Ozuna’s isolated slugging, which is to say: The harder hits haven’t just been doinkers, they’ve translated into extra bases. So maybe this is real. Or perhaps it’s BABIP magic. It’s certainly a different case than that of …

8. Odubel Herrera, whose transformation remains one of the head-scratchingest in recent years. Herrera was a Rule 5 pick in 2015, plucked from the Texas organization, where he had languished behind Jurickson Profar and Rougned Odor and other middle-infield prospects. While nothing about Herrera’s stat line screamed special, the Phillies were rebuilding and saw enough to hand him their starting center field job, even though his center-field experience consisted of 52 Venezuelan Winter League games.

Odubel Herrera has been a pleasant surprise for the Phillies. (Getty Images)
Odubel Herrera has been a pleasant surprise for the Phillies. (Getty Images)

Herrera was good last year, more than adequate for a rookie on a bad team. The Herrera of 2016 has exceeded their 100th percentile projection, giving them a .319/.424/.445 slashing 24-year-old who actually can play center pretty well. It’s the .424 that is the most mystifying. After walking 28 times last season, Herrera drew 23 walks this April alone. His regression in May has been stark – a 10-to-22 walk-to-strikeout ratio, compared to 23-to-18 in April – and it’s got the Phillies and others wondering whether the first month was some anomaly.

They hope not, because it tends to be the out-of-nowhere players that are the most underappreciated. And this is not to say …

9. Jose Altuve came out of nowhere, because nobody who hits a cumulative .327 over his minor league career is sneaking up on anyone. Though if ever there were someone who could do it, Altuve might have the best shot. Because he’s 5-foot-5. Get it?

Requisite stupid short joke out of the way, let’s gape at Altuve not because of what he’s doing despite his size but because of what he does period. The class Altuve could join this year is one of the truly exclusive in baseball history. Currently, Altuve is hitting .325/.403/.553. The only players to finish at least .325/.400/.550 with 30-plus stolen bases in a season: Vlad Guerrero, Larry Walker, Ellis Burks, Rickey Henderson, Paul Molitor, Willie Mays, Kiki Cuyler, Ken Williams, George Sisler, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker and Shoeless Joe Jackson. That’s a lot of Hall of Famers.

While Altuve always has been a pleasure to watch, seeing him at this level is particularly enjoyable. He defies so many of our preconceptions about baseball, and even if he is an outlier, that’s fine. It’s not like anybody is arguing …

10. Mike Trout has been too good for too long. Or … maybe they sort of are. The idea that we’ve grown numb to Trout’s performance makes us seem so spoiled, but then did we understand what we were witnessing during Peak Pedro or Sandy Koufax’s career-ending run? Nah. Did we fully appreciate the first 10 years of Albert Pujols’ career (.331/.426/.624!!!)? Of course not.

If our worst sin as fans is not realizing the excellence of today, well, surely there are worst. So Mike Trout can go out and do his thing in relative anonymity in the shadows of Los Angeles, and we still get to tell our kids and our kids’ kids that we saw him in the flesh, doing what he does, and the myth can grow that way.

For now, though, take a night, any night, and tune in. Because the show is as good as ever. And that’s what makes it so great.