Some teams, like the Seattle Mariners , have given up trying to get Mike Trout to swing and miss. (AP)

Eleven years ago, The Washington Post arranged an experiment. Joshua Bell, one of the finest violinists in the world, would play during the morning rush at a subway stop, and the Post would chronicle what happened. For 43 minutes, Bell busked as more than 1,000 people walked by. Almost nobody stopped.

Maybe it was the myopia of the daily commute, the monotony of every trip, every step, every moment feeling the same, that caused those people to walk by Joshua Bell that day. None, after all, could fall back upon the iPhone-zombie defense; the first version of the device wouldn’t arrive for another six months.

The likelier culprit is the simplest excuse: that for all the praise we’re capable of lavishing, all the shackles we wear as prisoners of the moment, all the searches we enlist to find the biggest and best and ultimate, human beings can be horrible at recognizing brilliance when it stares them directly in the face, ignorant to the very thing they spend all that time seeking.

This is the only reasonable explanation for why nobody seems to be noticing that Mike Trout is nearly halfway to what might be the greatest season in baseball history.

Awfulness, on the other hand, should be obvious. It is a punch to the face, a roadkill skunk, a cloud of pepper spray meeting mucous membranes, a guitar plugged into an amp cranked to 11. Greatness can traffic in the margins, manifest itself subtly. Awfulness is visceral, punitive, palpable.

Which is what makes baseball so confusing. On any particular night, Mike Trout, who is the best baseball player in the world, and who is off to a pretty good start if he has intentions of being the best baseball player ever, is capable of looking awful. Perhaps that is the moral of this story, that it is easy to get caught up in one game or two games or even 10 games, but that greatness and awfulness in baseball exist over months, day after day, those games piling up so quickly that it takes an active interest to detect their cumulative enormity.

And that may go a long way to explaining why just as few people seem to be noticing that Chris Davis is nearly halfway to what might be the worst season in baseball history.

*****

It is June 15, and anybody who dare declare best and worst of anything on June 15 ought to come armed with a caveat, so here goes: All of the following is premised on what has happened over the first 2½ months of the 2018 season continuing to happen over the final 3½ months. And an infinite number of things can conspire to keep that particular destiny from being fulfilled, so if one wanted to deem this wish-casting, it would be difficult to argue.

Still, Major League Baseball has been around for more than 140 years. Nearly 20,000 players have accumulated more than 16 million plate appearances. The game has bred greatness and awfulness and everything in between. The notion that the very best and very worst seasons by a hitter would take place in the very same year, after the tens of thousands of individual seasons before it, is nothing short of incredible. That it’s even a possibility is a marvel.

Trout’s end isn’t altogether surprising. At 26 years old, he is in the midst of his prime during an era where the ball is flying like never before. He possesses rare power, plate discipline and speed. He plays center field for the Los Angeles Angels and plays it well. If a player of this era were to challenge Babe Ruth for the greatest season ever, the overwhelming favorite would be Mike Trout.

That Chris Davis finds himself slumming among the dregs of the sport, on the other hand, almost defies belief.

Only 18 men in baseball history have hit at least 53 home runs in a season. Chris Davis is one of them. In the 2013 season, he joined a group that includes Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., Hank Greenberg and others whose struggles, whenever they cropped up, were mitigated by a swing that could send baseball over a fence. The home run does not provide immunity to baseball’s vagaries. It is one hell of a bulwark.

The closest comparable to what is happening to Davis is Ryan Howard, who hit 58 home runs in his finest season. A decade later, Howard couldn’t scrape his batting average above .200, barely walked, struck out about a third of the time he stepped to the plate and fielded at first base as though his shoes were tied together – all with a salary of $25 million. But he never stopped hitting home runs. He managed 65 hits in his last major league season; 25 of them were homers. Howard was bad. He just wasn’t all time.

Story continues