Mike Trout is playing like an MVP again. If you’re surprised, that’s on you.
“Anything that he’s doing, I know you guys have seen it before,” Angels manager Ron Washington said last week before the series opener in Cincinnati. “It’s not a surprise when he hits a ball 450 feet.”
That was seemingly referring to Trout’s titanic blast earlier this month in Miami, his 13th home run of 450-plus feet in the Statcast Era (since 2015). So far this season, Trout is leading the American League with 10 homers (he hit another on Wednesday) and is on pace to set a career high for homers in a season.
But no matter the stop-and-start nature of his recent injury-marred seasons, Trout has never ceased hitting the ball hard with regularity. Even in 2023, comfortably his worst season as a big leaguer, he ranked in the 95th percentile in xwOBA, barrel rate and hard-hit rate. To Washington’s point, anyone taken aback by the right-handed slugger’s ability to smash baseballs to previously undiscovered areas of big-league ballparks has simply not been paying attention.
Washington’s next assertion, though, was a bit more curious. Because while Trout hitting like an MVP again is hardly a stunner, based on his track record, another part of his game has stood out through the first month of the 2024 MLB season.
“It’s not a surprise when he’s stealing two bags,” Washington said, referencing Trout’s two-steal game Thursday against Tampa Bay. “He’s done that before.”
Technically, yes, we have seen that from Trout — but not for quite some time. That was Trout’s first multi-steal game since July 23, 2018. In other words: It was a surprise.
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‘What he’s doing right now, it’s no surprise to us’
While the pure speed has never abandoned him — Trout has ranked in the top 10% of MLB in average sprint speed every season since Statcast began tracking it in 2015 — Trout’s ambition on the basepaths has lessened to a borderline stunning degree as he has aged. When he stole two bases in that game in Tampa — second and then third during the same at-bat — he matched his total through 82 games last season in just 19 contests. And with his next steal, Trout’s 2024 total of six will equal what he amassed in the previous four seasons combined.
Whether the lack of stealing in recent years has been a matter of self-preservation — Trout sprained his thumb stealing second and missed nearly two months back in 2017 —…