Matt Martell is off today to jump into a much-deserved long weekend for Memorial Day. Emma Baccellieri has you covered in his stead.
There is a line that former ESPN writer Sam Miller used to say, in podcasts and in conversation, about when you could trust small-sample-size noise had disappeared from baseball statistics at the beginning of the season: The year had really started when Mike Trout was back on top of the leaderboards.
It was a joke, but then again, was it? For a few seasons, this seemed as reliable a measure as anything. Of course Trout could safely be assumed to be the best player in baseball year in and year out. It was not that his greatness was taken for granted so much as it was a sign of basic stability—as close to a natural law of the universe as anything modern baseball could provide. And then it got slightly more complicated. Trout was still Trout. But injuries sidelined him for the majority of 2021, after he posted the weakest hitting performance of his career during the shortened pandemic season of ’20, and, while none of that clouded his greatness, it at least shook the idea of his talent as a guaranteed, superhuman force. Trout turned 30 last August. It became easier to imagine a future version of him as simply very, very good, rather than unfailingly and incomprehensibly great.
