Kuzul

Obviously, you’re not surprised to see “Mike Trout” and “most valuable” in the same sentence. Trout was the runner-up in the American League MVP voting in 2012 and 2013 before winning the award in 2014. His name and “most valuable” have appeared together a lot over the last three years.

And yet all that now looks like little more than a prolonged warm-up for what Trout is doing in 2015.

Part of the equation is that the Los Angeles Angels‘ 23-year-old superstar is having yet another stupendous season. Maybe not his best season, mind you, but it’s at least his most balanced season since back in 2012. Like he was then, he’s truly doing it all.

For starters, Trout has been an on-base machine. He’s hitting .294 with a .381 on-base percentage. Neither is his best mark, but both are improvements over last year’s .287 average and .377 OBP. For this, he can thank his newly crafted aggressive approach and, as ESPN Stats & Info highlighted, turning his weakness against high pitches into a strength:

Trout is also hitting for power. His raw power production has taken only a slight downturn from where it was in 2014, and his 13 dingers put him on pace for a career-high 41. Considering that he entered the week making hard contact a career-best 41.5 percent of the time, he might actually get there.

But it’s not all about Trout’s bat. He’s also using his legs, as his eight stolen bases put him on a pace for 25. If he gets there, he’ll have reversed a trend that saw his steals fall from 49 in 2012 to 33 in 2013 to just 16 in 2014. 

Lastly, the advanced metrics have Trout back to playing quality defense in center field after down years in 2013 and 2014. Entering Monday, ultimate zone rating said Trout’s defense has saved three runs above average. Defensive runs saved disagreed, saying his defense had actually saved twice as many runs.

In so many words: After flirting with becoming a bat-only player in 2013 and 2014, Trout is actually living up to his reputation as the game’s best all-around player in 2015. Cue Bryce Harper to sum it up.

“Baseball is always, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ That’s just how the game works. I still believe Trout is the best player in the game, hands down,” the Washington Nationals superstar told ESPN.com’s Jerry Crasnick a week ago. 

It’s indeed hard to argue the point. And even if it doesn’t back it completely, wins above replacement once again strongly agrees with it.

According to Baseball-Reference.com, Trout began the week tied for third in the AL in WAR at 3.2. FanGraphs put him at only 2.9 WAR, but that was good enough for sole possession of third on its AL leaderboard.

All this is the long way around the barn of stating the obvious: Based on his play alone, yes, Trout is once again a leading candidate for the AL MVP award. 

However, remember that this is only part of the equation. The other part is more beneath the surface, and it’s where Trout is really demonstrating the whole “most valuable” thing like never before.

In the background of Trout’s latest awesome season is an Angels team that’s, well, not awesome. Before sweeping a four-game series against the Detroit Tigers over the weekend, they were just 23-24.

Of course, Trout’s awesomeness being wasted on not-so-awesome teams is nothing new. Before he took part in a 98-win season in 2014, his efforts were wasted on an 89-win team in 2012 and on a 78-win team in 2013. Like Ewan McGregor in the Star Wars prequels, he was a bright spot in a sea of “meh.”

But even on those teams, Trout had at least some help. It’s hard to say as much about his current situation, especially in his primary neck of the woods: on offense.

Because the Angels entered the week ranked 14th in the AL in OPS and runs scored, it’s not a secret that their offense has issues. But it’s still shocking, as what’s going on this year represents a huge drop-off from the prior three seasons:

The reasons for this are plentiful. Albert Pujols is back to looking old and over the hill. Howie Kendrick’s dependable bat is in Los Angeles proper. Matt Joyce has failed miserably at being a Plan B for Josh Hamilton. And speaking of Hamilton, the Angels’ pettiness put him back in Texas.

At any rate, all it takes is one glance at what Trout has done offensively and one glance at what the Angels as a whole have done offensively, and you can come to a conclusion that Trout has truly taken over the Atlas role for the Angels offense. That is, it all rests squarely on his shoulders.

But we can put some more numbers to the idea too, and what they say is straightforward: yup.

For this, we’ll turn to two useful but obscure stats: Bill James’ runs created (RC) formula and Tom Tango’s weighted runs created (wRC) formula. The two stats have different calculations, but they both measure a player’s offensive value in terms of how many of his teams runs he’s created.

Entering play Monday, Trout’s RC stood at 40. That’s out of the 192 runs the Angels have created—not the same as scored—so Trout is responsible for 20.8 percent of the team’s offense.

As for Trout’s wRC, that stands at 38 out of the Angels’ total of 180. That’s 21.1 percent.

Given how awesome Trout has been in an otherwise terrible lineup, his accounting for a fifth of the Angels’ offense sounds about right. It’s also, as these figures show, the biggest weight he’s ever carried:

In 2012, 2013 and 2014, Trout was most certainly a valuable member of the Angels offense. But in 2015, he’s become downright indispensable. Without him, the Angels offense might be the worst in baseball.

But of course, hitting isn’t what Trout is all about. He’s the complete package, and that’s where WAR can provide an additional perspective on what he’s meant to the Angels.

Ask FanGraphs, and it’ll tell you that Trout’s 2.9 WAR is out of the Angels’ total WAR of 10.7. That’s 27.1 percent. And while that doesn’t match the 28.0 percent of the Angels’ WAR he accounted for in 2013, it still borders on ridiculous to see a single player accounting for more than a quarter of his team’s value.

Baseball-Reference.com, meanwhile, has a slightly different opinion. It has Trout accounting for 3.2 of 9.1 total WAR, or 35.2 percent. That’s not just an even more ridiculous chunk of the team’s overall value but also a mark that blows his previous career best of 26.8 percent (also in 2013) out of the water.

So when Pujols said Monday night, via Pedro Moura of the Orange Country Register, that the Angels aren’t “the Mike Trout show,” he wasn’t entirely right. Because the thing is, they kinda are.

Bottom line: Just when you thought Trout couldn’t possibly be more worth raving about, he goes and does something like this. Albeit with a bit of help from the Angels, he’s found a way to go from being “most valuable” to “even more valuable.”

Of course, there’s no guarantee things are going to stay this way. Maybe Trout can keep up his end of the bargain, but his production won’t loom quite as large if some of the quality hitters in the Angels lineup wake up. 

Also, none of this is to say that we should go ahead and give Trout his second straight AL MVP and be done with it. It’s a wee bit soon for that, and Nelson Cruz and (naturally) Miguel Cabrera are just two of several worthy competitors. 

But if it so happens that the final two-thirds of the Angels’ season continues to resemble the first third of their season, by the end, they’ll be a team fighting hard for a wild-card spot thanks overwhelmingly to one guy. He’ll have his strongest case yet for an MVP award, which is saying something in his case.

Regardless of how things pan out, you can at least consider all this as the latest in a long line of reasons not to take Trout for granted. His excellence really should be ho-hum by now, but evidently, he’s just as good at self-one-upmanship as he is at baseball.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

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