Trout or Mantle: Settling the Comparison

Last night we made an unassuming tweet comparing Trout’s career to date stats alongside those of Mickey Mantle at a similar point in his career. They weren’t apple-to-apple comparisons as Mantle had played 9 full seasons, while Trout has yet to complete his 9th season.

There were two interesting side conversations that resulted from this simple post: the first, that we can’t actually compare them because they played in different eras, so we’ll never know how they really compare. The second was that Mantle played in an era that was significantly more challenging for a power hitter with the larger ballparks and the non-juiced balls; and there was much focus put on the size of the stadiums and we can tackle this one as part of our answer to the first.

So, let’s take a deeper dive on these topics. First, can we really compare Mantle and Trout? This one is fairly easy, YES. Yes, we can compare them, and quite accurately. We can’t say how Trout would perform with his modern conditioning in the 1950s and we can’t say how Mantle would play with his conditioning today. However, we can compare how they played relative to their peers with the conditioning of their time.

We have play by play data going back decades, batted ball and pitch tracking data going back years, and boxscores and records going back nearly two centuries. This data set allows us to create accurate comparisons across many different metrics. Most of the data presented in that tweet were raw stats without any context for the era, however, the post did include OPS+, which does allow for direct comparison as the stat is inherently normalized against their peers/league. They were nearly identical with Trout holding the slight edge 176 to 173.

What makes this more fascinating is that the run scoring environments for both Mantle and Trout to this point in their careers were relatively similar, as well. For Mantle the league hit .260/.336/.389/.725 over this time, where for Trout the league hit .250/.315/.581/.721. With both of them playing in an overall runs/game environment slightly below the MLB historical average of 4.53 (4.33 for Mantle and 4.35 for Trout, this includes stadium factors). Similar value, but attained in slightly different ways.

Along those lines, much has been made of old Yankee Stadiums deep power Alley to left field and centerfield and how much this would have cost Mantle, and while there may be some validity to this, there is also no discussion of the incredibly short fences down the lines or the distribution of Mantle’s HRs. Mantle hit 200 HRs off of RHP, and as a switch hitter, he was likely batting LH. He hit 130 HRs to right field, 16 to right center, 68 to left field, 12 to left center, 34 to center, and he pulled 169 of them. The majority were down or near the lines. For comparison, Trout has hit 87 to left field, 80 to left center, and 65 to dead center. 180 of Trout’s HRs are classified as middle as opposed to pulled or opposite. Mantle pulled 61%, whereas Trout hit 63% of his between center and the alleys.

Now, the argument could be made that since this only counts actual HRs, we’re missing his long outs, but I argue we’re not, they show up in his stats as doubles, triples, and long singles. Or even inside-the-park-HRs, of which Mantle hit 5 in this time period, 4 of which went to left-center or center field, and they don’t have tracking on the 5th, but I’d imagine it likely went that way as well.

Yankee Stadium was a pitcher friendly stadium suppressing run scoring by roughly 10% during this time, it also suppressed hits in general, but was neutral on doubles and triple friendly. It is easy to conclude that lost HRs here turned into doubles and triples given the propensity to lose hits overall and from Mantle’s profile it looks like he gained more HRs down the lines than he lost to left center/center.

Similarly, Angel Stadium is pitcher friendly, suppressing runs at roughly 8% during Trout’s time, but it does it by suppressing all hit types. It suppresses HRs at roughly the same rate as Yankee Stadium did, but also heavily suppresses triples, suppresses doubles, it just doesn’t suppress hits in general by quite the same amount.

The juiced ball is a whole other topic (that we will also discuss in more details at a later time), but it doesn’t effect value comparisons as everyone in 2019 is using the same ball, so when you look at Trout’s OPS+ or WAR, it’s factoring that in (and WAR also factors the ballpark effects). So, when you look at Trout’s 176 OPS+ and WAR (72.6 bWAR, 73.2 fWAR, 63.9 WARP) compared to Mantle’s 173 OPS+ and WAR (68.1 bWAR, 61.2 fWAR, 60.3 WARP), it’s clear that Trout compares favorably to Mantle, and relative to their peers and environments, Trout has been better than Mantle.

All of this should make us appreciate what we get to watch day in and day out as opposed to getting defensive about comparing Trout to an all-time great. We are watching an all-time great right before our eyes.