Mike Trout versus Mookie Betts -- who would you rather?

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by nat

On average, this shouldn't make any difference. Replacement level is intended to be the level of the last guy off the bench, so you should expect (PLAYER'S WAR + REPLACEMENT'S WAR) to just equal PLAYER'S WAR. Now, that's just on average, and a given team might have a stronger bench than average, and maybe the Red Sox/Dodgers had a better bench than the Angels. But it's hard to see how that should change your evaluation of Trout/Betts (as opposed to the BOS/LAD vs. LAA front office that constructs the roster).

As for the question of which career would you rather have: even though Trout is the greater player, I think I'd go with Mookie. It must be incredibly frustrating to get injured over and over again and have to sit on the sidelines for, effectively, years on end.

I think I worded it poorly, but my point was that Trout has had to be replaced by a bench player, far more often than Betts. You can see that, in that they’ve played an almost identical number of games, despite Trout being in the League for 3 more seasons. That’s lost value for a team.

On top of that, due to his versatility, Betts has actually been able to fill in for other starters in other positions when needed. I have no idea how to quantify that statistically, but I imagine it’s positively impactful to a team.

Of course, all things being equal, if Trout had been even relatively healthy throughout his career, just on the level of Betts, who I mentioned earlier is not exactly an Iron Man himself, then he certainly would have been my choice.