He appeared in ESPN The Magazine's 2016 Body Issue wearing a beekeeper suit because he felt bad showing off. His walk-up song is the Windows startup music. No such classic moments come to mind when you think of Trout, and this is because he is a boring person with zero star power. Who can forget the iconic moment when he interrupted Lou Gehrig's farewell speech in 1939 to play "Camptown Races" on his recorder? Or his famous called shot at the 1932 World Series, when he pointed at a vendor in the bleachers and proceeded to order five hot dogs during his at-bat? Ruth, celebrated worldwide not just for his athletic feats but also his adultery and many fun goofs, had star power in gross excess. Let's call this one a wash.īeyond the stat sheet, there are many intangibles that contribute to a player's greatness, and star power is what determines the size of one's footprint in the popular lore of the game. ![]() Their heads sort of just merge into their shoulders. Nonetheless, Trout still comes out on top as the better baserunner.īoth players fail to impress in this category, as neither really has much of a neck. ![]() What Ruth lacked in speed he made up for in distrust of the Irish. Ruth also had some of the best wheels in baseball, but more literally speaking, as he preferred to round the bases on an electric Rascal-type scooter, his huge, slow-moving legs mostly serving as cosmetic appendages. ![]() With 31 baserunning runs over the past five seasons, Trout has some of the best wheels in baseball. 1 (above) illustrates Ruth's defensive prowess as compared with those of Trout and a vacuum cleaner with a baseball glove taped to it.Īs you can see from this data, Trout is roughly 600 times better at defense than Ruth, who, as we can also see, is dead. Cutoff throws often would get lodged in the fatty flesh on the back of his head, allowing countless runners to take extra bases every season. Ruth, conversely, was roughly as effective on defense as a pile of scrambled eggs, allowing more than 300 inside-the-park home runs during his career because he didn't feel like bending over to pick up the ball. Trout is an electrifying fielder who makes highlight-reel grabs with ridiculous ease, averaging 2.6 catches per nine innings that technically classify as magic from the devil, according to Statcast™. His dingers basically looked like weird popups that went far somehow, earning Ruth a paltry career WDQ score of 4.8 Dinger Points (very bad). He would swing without raising his elbows or rotating his hips, lazily waving his bat out in front of his belly like an old arthritic orangutan swatting at a horsefly. While it's true that he broke just about every single home run record during his storied career, if you watch footage of his dingers, you will see that they were not breathtaking spectacles like Trout's but rather the stupid-looking dingers of yore, with wonky, old-timey mechanics. They are dingers of the highest quality, collectively notching a career WDQ score of 13.76 out of 14 possible Dinger Points (very good). When Trout really connects with a dinger, play-by-play announcers just scream and scream until they either pass out or the telecast cuts to commercial. And few power hitters have spit in the face of God more than Trout, whose dingers explode off his bat with such staggering force that fans often accidentally decapitate themselves whipping their heads around to follow them. They hit moon shots of mythical proportions that defy the laws of physics and spit in the face of God. The greatest power hitters don't just hit home runs. So Ruth comes out on top but with a big asterisk. However, MLB rosters in the early years of Ruth's career had largely been gutted by World War I conscription, and desperate teams filled their benches with farm animals and large toddlers stolen from orphanages, meaning it was much easier to contribute beyond replacement level back then. Through his age-25 season, Trout generated an astronomical 53.2 WAR, while the Great Bambino had a mind-boggling 271.6 WAR in that same time frame. But how accurate is that claim? Using advanced metrics, we can empirically determine just how dominant Trout truly is, comparing him side by side with the man widely considered baseball's GOAT: Babe Ruth. Some are making the case that he could be the greatest all-around player ever. MIKE TROUT IS the best baseball player alive, having achieved a level of success in his first six full seasons unprecedented in the game. ![]() 18 athlete Mike Trout's actual greatness, by humorist Steve Etheridge, appears in ESPN The Magazine's April 2 Dominant 20 Anniversary Issue. The Dominant 20: Sizing up Mike Trout and the Sultan of Swat, most unseriously You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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