LA Times

Los Angeles Angels center fielder Mike Trout is only 25 years old. He has three more years left on a six-year contract, and no injury history that would suggest an early retirement. It would be reasonable to estimate that he has about ten to fifteen seasons of baseball left. Nonetheless, if he was to forgo those years and retire tomorrow, his career would already be worthy of the Hall of Fame.

Let me lay out the case.

Trout technically made his debut back in the 2011 season; however, it was only a short stint of 40 games and 135 plate appearances.

Trout’s career really started in 2012, and he’s been on a historic run ever since. He’s led the American League in fWAR for every season since then, and led the Majors in every year except 2015, when he trailed Bryce Harper by an insignificant 0.5 WAR. His career total in that statistic stands at 47.7, just 18.7 shy of recent Hall inductee Tim Raines, despite 6801 fewer plate appearances. If he stays on pace over the next two seasons, Trout will have produced the amount of value in 7 seasons that most Hall of Famer’s do in 20.

However, that would require two more seasons. If Trout were to retire tomorrow, his case for the Hall is still built around fWAR — though in a different way.

In the history of Major League Baseball, there are only 51 seasons in which a player reached a 10.0 fWAR. That is 51 out of a pool of 15,025 qualified seasons, dating back to 1871.

Thirty of those seasons took place during the racist era — a time before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 and the talent pool was artistically limited. A further 13 took place before 1980.

That leaves only 10 seasons in baseball’s true modern era in which 10.0 fWAR was achieved — Mike Trout owns 2 of them. The other 8 are split between four hitters: Barry Bonds (5), Cal Ripkin (1), Alex Rodriguez (1), and Ricky Henderson (1).

The big point to be made is this: since 1980, Mike Trout is the only player other than Barry Bonds (the greatest hitter of all time) to produce multiple 10 WAR seasons. Ken Griffey Junior, who sailed into the Hall on his first ballot with a record 99.3% of the vote, never produced one 10+ WAR season.

Is one season worthy of the Hall of Fame? It’s debatable — 10.0 is a godlike feat, but could potentially be a fluke. Norm Cash did it once in in 1961, and 13 years later retired with just 54.6 and never sniffed the Hall. But Trout did it twice, and has been in the 9’s a further two times. That kind of dominance, even over a limited period of time, has to be recognized.