Thank you Brady Aiken for turning down the Astros offer... And Bregman is the MVP, he might have the better team, but that’s on Trout, who took the Angels and squeezed them for every last penny they could find for him. The Angels will be limited financially for the next decade. Bregman had more pressure at bats than Trout because the Astros are slugging out games trying to win their fair share. So yes Trout leads in all the categories, but Bregman is carrying his weight on one of the top 3 teams in baseball.
Interesting take. If anything, Trout signed a team friendly deal. The value of a WAR is ~$8m on the open market and he's consistently producing 8-10 WAR a season. It is incredibly unlikely the Angels could more effectively spend $35m/year. He's like prime Lebron. He's so much better than the max contract (MLB being what the market would pay) that complaining about what is actually being paid is moot.
Yep, the real problem with the Angels is that they didn’t have any really good young players come up with Trout, so they spent a ton of money on Hamilton and Pujols without getting the pitching needed to really contend. Then when that phase ended, and they caught a couple lucky breaks being able to land Ohtani and Simmons, they again spent money on offense (Upton and Cozart) without properly addressing their pitching. Of course, they’ve also had a lot of bad luck (Skaggs death, injuries to Ohtani, Richards, etc.). I think the Angels have a chance to be really really good next year if Ohtani can come back pitching like he was and they are able to sign Cole and another top pitcher. They may have to dump Upton and Calhoun to clear payroll but Trout, Ohtani, Simmons, and Adell is a nice core offense, and Cole, Ohtani, and somebody like Hamels with Heaney and Canning behind them would be a very good rotation. If anyone beside the owner/luck/GM should be blamed for the Angels not being contenders with Trout, it’s Pujols.
I love the Astros and Bregman but Trout is amazing and worth every penny of his annual salary. I don't know about him being worth at 35 years + though. They are going to be paying 37 million a year when he's Pujol's age. Would you rather have Trout or Bregman plus Reddick because the annual salaries are similar?
I mean, he probably still will be a 3 or 4 war player then, so he probably still will be worth whatever he’s pod up to the last day of his deal (this one anyway- he could extend like ARod did half way thru) but he’s racking up so much value on the front end that the Halos are getting a bargain, regardless, absent career ending injury, which I’d suppose they are insured against.
A salary a player is paid in a year is not tied to only that year. When Trout is 35, most of his salary should be viewed as paying for his performance now as he's being underpaid by about $40M a year now.
My wife loves Bregman too... Barring injury, Trout will run away with the AL MVP. Much like going against roided Bonds, it really isn't fair since Trout has deserved the MVP every year he has been healthy except last season when Betts had an all-time great season, and even then if the roles were reversed he probably would have won as they were very even stat wise.
Nope. He's hitting fewer line drives and fewer pop ups. He's replacing those with batted balls in the 30 degree (+/- 10 degrees) launch angles. Basically, he appears to be trying to hit the balls to same trajectory (if anything slightly higher), but is executing more often.