Angels center fielder and divine baseball being Mike Trout is reportedly close to finalizing an extension that will pay him more than $426.5 million over 12 years. The agreement, which doesn’t include an opt-out, ties Trout to the Angels through his 39th birthday, an age by which it’s conceivable that he’ll no longer be the best player in baseball. Trout was already due $66.5 million for 2019-20 under the terms of the six-year extension he signed in 2014, but even viewed as a 10-year, $360 million addition to that preexisting deal, this contract would break the record for total dollars committed, besting Bryce Harper’s 13-year, $330 million deal from last month (which Scott Boras barely had time to brag about before it was eclipsed). Along with long-term security, Trout will receive a slight raise in average annual value, which will stay at $36 million throughout the life of the deal.
The obvious first response to seeing a number as big as $430 million (or even $360 million) is, “That’s a lot of money.” The obvious second response is, “Well, yeah—we’re talking about Trout.” It would be weird if a player that much better at baseball than everyone else weren’t also that much better compensated. Viewed in that light, the surprising thing about the terms of this contract is that Trout won’t be making more. Trout will retire with more than $500 million in career earnings. He’s doing fine financially. But as hefty as his salary is, it won’t shatter the scale in the way his performance on the field does. The problem for Trout is that he’s too good to be paid exactly what he’s worth.
We’ll stipulate something that hardly needs to be said: If making $426.5 million is a problem, it’s one we’d all like to have. It’s never easy to argue that an athlete is underpaid even though he’ll make far more money in a decade than most of us can imagine making in multiple lifetimes. Admittedly, in a world where earnings were parceled out by an all-knowing entity based on societal utility or Good Place points, not even Trout would make so much more than the average citizen. In this world, though, the money that’s now going to Trout wasn’t going to go to teachers or ticket buyers or hungry minor leaguers, but to Angels owner Arte Moreno. Begrudging Trout the millions he’s making is akin to being upset that Moreno isn’t making more.
As Jeff Sullivan noted for FanGraphs in February, Trout has—both recently and over the course of several years—been as productive as Harper and Manny Machado combined. In other words, take the superstar who just signed for $330 million, add him to a second superstar who just signed for $300 million, and you have Trout—except that Trout takes up only one roster spot. If Trout were a free agent today, the bidding should begin at $500 million, and even $600 million would make some sense on paper.
Granted, we can’t directly compare Trout’s contract to Harper’s or Machado’s, because they were free agents, whereas Trout was still two seasons and more than a year and a half away from free agency. Trout is roughly a year older than Harper and Machado today, but by the time he hit free agency, he would have been a few years older than Harper and Machado were this winter. The Angels committed to Trout’s age-29-through-38 seasons without having seen his age-27 and age-28 seasons. As hard as it is to imagine Trout’s performance heading downhill in the near future, considering that in some ways he’s still getting better, there’s a chance that he’ll decline prematurely or suffer a career-altering injury, and that risk is priced into this extension. Trout is, after all, due to turn 28 in August, and most mortal players are either at or past their primes by that point. There’s every reason to think that Trout will have peaked prior to 2021, the first of the “new” 10 years covered by this contract.
Of course, whether he’s already reached it or it’s still to come, Trout’s peak is so lofty that he can fall very far before any other player surpasses him. We’ve all heard the Hall of Fame fun fact: Trout is the best player ever through age 26. Then there’s the other Hall of Fame fun fact: Trout’s career value surpassed the average Hall of Fame center fielder’s before he turned 27. Trout has accrued almost 20 WAR more than the next-best player since his first full season in 2012, and he’s likely to be the best for the foreseeable future too, even though he’s already almost 28.
PECOTA projects Trout to be worth 80.3 WARP over the next 10 seasons (including 2019). That’s 13 wins more than the next-best player, Mookie Betts, who’s more than a year younger. ZiPS is somewhat more conservative in its long-term projections, but that system also puts Trout on top over the next 10 years at 66 WAR, 10 more than second-place Francisco Lindor. Trout doesn’t have to be worth nearly that much to make this investment pay off for the Angels.
Essentially, Trout is better than any other player who’s come along in the era of nine-figure contracts. Yet his contract, adjusted for inflation, is smaller than either of Alex Rodriguez’s, and it’s not that much larger than Giancarlo Stanton’s extension, which was the record-dollar deal before Harper’s. Stanton, like Trout, was two years away from free agency when he signed his 13-year, $325 million extension in November 2014. Granted, Stanton, who had just completed his age-24 season, was younger then than Trout is today. But Stanton wasn’t anywhere near the player Trout was or is; Trout, for instance, was almost 2.5 times more valuable than Stanton through their respective age-24 seasons. And Stanton’s contract included an opt-out after age 30.
Based on the two players’ performance, Trout’s contract should dwarf Stanton’s, even if the cost of a win is still linear. Yet his payday is barely bigger at all. And while Trout’s $36 million annual salary technically represents a record (for now), it’s almost indistinguishable from other contemporary top earners’, only slightly surpassing Zack Greinke’s current $34 million rate. Adjusted for inflation, it’s not even a top-10 total.
Depending on one’s perspective, then, Trout’s extension is either THE BIGGEST CONTRACT EVER or “a little bit bigger than the current contracts of far-inferior players, and smaller than some previous contracts after adjusting for inflation.” The latter interpretation makes this deal look less than fitting for the best player in baseball (and possibly the best player ever through this stage of his career). In the same way that it’s hard to wrap one’s head around how great Trout is relative to other excellent players, it’s difficult to grasp how much more money Trout deserves to earn, especially since every contract in this stratosphere seems almost unimaginably large. Normally we estimate what kind of contract a player could command by stacking him up against similar players, taking their contracts into account, and adjusting slightly up or down. But it’s tough to determine comparable contracts when you’re dealing with an incomparable player.
Trout is so valuable that paying him a salary commensurate with his skill would swallow something like one-third of a team’s payroll room beneath the boundary that triggers the competitive-balance tax. That soft cap will likely rise during the decade Trout just signed away, but devoting so much of the payroll to one player would still require a radical recalibration for many owners and executives. Psychologically speaking, a nine-figure contract that starts with a four looks enormous; replace that four with a five or a six, and even more minds would be blown. That unavoidable sticker shock was always bound to lower the realistic target for Trout.
One wonders what kind of contract Trout might have been able to land had he held out for every obtainable dollar. Because he’s so clearly baseball’s best player, Trout had the potential to raise the salary ceiling for the rest of the game. Trout’s primary duty is to himself and his family, and it’s not necessarily his responsibility to lend other players a financial helping hand. By setting the ceiling so close to where it was already, however, Trout may have inadvertently made it more difficult for other players to push past that point, at a time when spending has already stagnated. It will probably be a while before any other player can convincingly argue that he’s better than Trout, which means it may also be some time before another player succeeds in commanding more money.
But Trout has always seemed more driven to be better at baseball than to maximize his earning power, and he reportedly feels a sense of loyalty to the Angels, although it’s not apparent from afar that they’ve treated him materially better than most teams would have treated a player of his importance and personality. His comfort in Anaheim and hope for the future evidently trumped the club’s repeated inability to build a competitive roster around him, dashing the dreams of any team (read: the Phillies) that thought it might make him theirs in 2021.
For the second time, the Angels have signed Trout to a nine-figure extension. And for the second time, they got themselves a steal. It may seem like the headline is that by the time he retires, Trout will have made more than $500 million playing baseball. But the more impressive story is that by the time he retires, Trout may well have been worth $500 million more than that to his team.
