Mike Trout is merely incredible now

Mike Trout is about to win his first Most Valuable Player award. By the time you read this, he might have already won it. This makes sense, considering he’s the best player in baseball. Put down the leaflet with WAR rankings that we passed out at the door of the Internet: Just look at the guy. The second he engages in a baseball-related activity, he looks like the best baseball player on whatever field he’s on. Now pick the leaflet back up. It’s confirmed by science. Trout is simply the best.

A brief list of past and present players with a career WAR lower than Mike Trout’s current 28.2 in 493 games:

The full list is over 15,000 players long, but we’ll stick with those guys. Some of those guys were perennial All-Stars, some of them lasted until their late 30s and some of them played well enough and long enough to secure a nine-figure contract on the open market. Trout, by this one measure, has accomplished more in his career before turning 23 than they did in years of playing time.

But the award-winning Trout isn’t as good as the one from a couple of years ago. Or the Trout of his first full season. It feels gross and nitpicky pointing that out on the day he finally wins the award he’s deserved for so long. But it’s not exactly a secret, and most of my words on Transcendent Mike Trout were spent in 2012 and 2013. This season was the debut of Merely Incredible Mike Trout.

It’s his own danged fault for setting expectations so high.

To be clear, Merely Incredible Mike Trout is, by definition, incredible. Take his raw numbers and put them in any era, and he’s still a star with his speed/power combination. We’re a touch jaded because we live in a low-offense era, and Trout plays in a pitcher’s park, but just the raw numbers are outstanding. Using my favorite toy at Baseball-Reference, let’s put those numbers into a new context. Here’s Trout with his numbers adjusted to the 1995 Angels:

Here’s the 2007 Angels:

And, by law, here are his numbers adjusted for Coors Field in 2000:

Merely Incredible Mike Trout is so amazing, so good. He can still run:

He can still hit:

He’s incredible. Merely incredible.

It’s probably time to explain the distinction. Transcendent Mike Trout came out of the ether, a magical being who was more centaur than Alex Rodriguez, a player who was more Alex Rodriguez than Alex Rodriguez ever was. Transcendent Mike Trout was a kid, an unknown, someone barely out of his teens who ran around on the field and did things we’ve never seen before.

When the old-timers talked about Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, this is why they couldn’t stop. Except, if athletes are measurably better now in every other sport -- sprinting, swimming, long-distance running -- wouldn’t it follow that baseball players are much better? And wouldn’t it follow that Mike Trout, at the age of 20, was the best baseball player the world has ever seen?

Yeah, I’ll buy it. If you ding Barry Bonds for his defense and/or supplemental materials, Mike Trout was almost certainly the most complete ballplayer in history. And where he was going to go from there was obvious:

He was 20, remember. The age of a prospect or draftee. The really, really good prospects might already be in High-A at that age. If they’re in Double-A, they’re almost certainly the youngest player in their league. Because Trout did what he did in the majors, it was only fair to assume he was going to get better and better and better and better.

It was never fair, of course. Whenever a player has one of the very best seasons in baseball history, it’s not fair to assume it’s going to happen ever again. This year the production went from “historical anomaly” to “merely incredible.” Trout filled out, too. He looked like a quick, powerful safety in 2011, getting his first hit on a bunt single. Now he looks like a linebacker. Apologies for switching sports for the metaphors, but you try describing the guy in baseball terms. He’s huge now, absolutely huge.

Perhaps as a result, the movement isn’t quite as effortless. The fielding isn’t the six-dimensional violation of physics that it was in his first full season. He’s not leading the league in steals these days, and he might not hit double digits in that category again soon. He’s leading the league in RBI and coming close in home runs. He’s a slugger now. He’s fine with leading the league in strikeouts, posting one of the top-50 whiffingest seasons in history. This is a different Mike Trout. He’s merely incredible.

The progression probably won’t be anything like that graph. He might win 10 MVPs and shatter records on his way to the Hall of Fame, but at some point there will be someone younger and hotter. They won’t have the season Trout did in 2012 -- no one will, at least not any time soon -- but they’ll have the tools stacked upon tools, and they’ll be the player with the unlimited potential and the career arc that looks like an arrow shot into the sun. Trout will be that boring ol’ All-Star, veteran, and future Hall of Famer, helping his team win more than any other player in baseball. If you think that’s cynical, stop to remember how you thought of Albert Pujols five years ago. Stop to remember what you think about him now. We don’t pay nearly enough attention to the merely incredible. We get too used to it. Trout’s 2014 might even be something of a disappointment -- an absurd concept, as if we’re walking out of The Godfather complaining that James Caan isn’t really Italian.

So let this be a Post-It Note, then. Stick it on your computer. Set a reminder on your phone. We should probably appreciate Mike Trout a helluva lot more. The shadow of unlimited potential he cast a couple of years ago shouldn’t mean a thing today. If it helps, pretend this was his rookie season. Pretend he was just a 22-year-old kid fresh off the bus from Salt Lake this season, and he hit like that while running the bases like that. That graph up there is relevant again. You’re anticipating more and more and more from him because, hey, he’s only 23 now.

Trout might give it to you. The new Mike Trout is merely incredible, but that’s plenty incredible enough. He’s still a freak of nature, a mutation who made the evolutionary tree of baseball fork off into a different direction, and now he will have the award to tell us what we already knew: Mike Trout is the best player in baseball, and he might get even better.