I heard the man without a plan to show me up, I'm set to go, I'm down, I'm bold to walk and know we're gonna let it go

I said we didn't want to see so all the ones got to go, I missed the bound, I don't want to stop, we gotta say I'm not a thing, I'm clean, I take the sea

I have the message now the message is mine

Hello and welcome to episode 1226 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Vangrass presented by our Patreon supporters

I'm Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer, joined by Justin of Vangrass Hello

If you consider it a race to see between yourself, Sam, myself, who can write the most about Mike Trout being the best and being on pace 4 at the best season of all time

Sam got the first, I did my little microanalyses, Sam wrote recently about how he's on pace with the best season ever

and then you wrote how he has improved his defense, talk about that

Yeah, I wonder if you added up all of the thousands of words that each of us has written about Mike Trout

I think I joked once that you and I and Sam and Grant, we should just put our collected Mike Trout works into a book or something at some point

The book of Trout, but yeah, I think I wanted to focus on his defense because, well, I already wrote about his offense

I can't keep writing about exactly the same thing over and over again, but the real reason I would say that he is on pace for his best season

and perhaps the best season of all time, yes, he's better on offense, but also he's much better on defense

and you might be inclined to be skeptical because, hey, it's a small sample and it's defensive stats

but I really dug into it and I am convinced that he is genuinely better at defense and range was not his strong suit

between his rookie year and this year really he was kind of a low average outfielder according to any system you looked at by center field standards

and this year every system says he's much better and I dug up stats and I talked to the Angels Outfield coach

and at the conclusion of all this inquiry, I found that Mike Trout is better at defense basically because Mike Trout wanted to be better at defense

and he just showed up this year and he asked, what can I be better at?

and he saw the stats were not that great and he said, okay, I want to be better at that and now he's better at that

and basically he is just running faster in the outfield, he is getting better jumps

he is just kind of going all out instead of kind of coasting on his still elite speed and he's just been fantastic

...