Will August slump cost Mike Trout the AL MVP?

Mike Trout had an abysmal August. Could it possibly cost him the AL MVP?

Picture a scenario in which every active player in Major League Baseball is being “re-drafted.”

Mike Trout is the number one overall pick, right?

At the ripe young age of 24, Trout has established himself as the best player in baseball for at least two full seasons (or longer, depending on who you ask), and given that he hasn’t entered his theoretical prime from an age perspective, there is no reason to think he will fall off a steep cliff anytime soon. However, the talented Los Angeles Angels outfielder just completed his worst month in recent memory, and it could possibly cost him some additional hardware for his ever-growing trophy case.

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Trout has been a staple atop most rankings for the 2015 AL MVP award this season, but his performance in August has placed that position in serious peril. For the month, Trout finished with a slash line of .218/.352/.337 with just one home run in 122 plate appearances. While his season-long numbers are still incredibly impressive, the field has caught up to the prohibitive favorite by nature of his nearly 30-day slump.

It is exceedingly fair to suggest that everyone (yes, everyone) goes through a slump during some portion of a full MLB season, but this level of hiccup is a rarity for someone like Trout. When the month of August began, the all-world outfielder sported a sparkling .317/.407/.642 slash line with 32 home runs in 425 plate appearances. And while some knocked the fact that he doesn’t run (10 total stolen bases on the season) anymore, there was no questioning his performance at the plate. Now, though, Trout’s profile seems rather ordinary compared to his established baseline from the past handful of seasons, including the fact that he sits with “only” 6.7 fWAR after two seasons with 10.0 or more on his résumé.

Enter Josh Donaldson.

Donaldson is the best player on the hottest team in baseball, as the Toronto Blue Jays have zoomed like a rocket to the top of the AL East standings. Toronto’s offense is absolutely loaded from top to bottom, but Donaldson is widely recognized as the team’s heart and soul thanks to high-end tools at the plate with arguably MLB’s best glove at the third base. Until his swoon began, Mike Trout held a solid lead over Donaldson when evaluating offense in a vacuum, but now Donaldson holds the edge in home runs (36 to 33) and slugging percentage (.585 to .576).

At this point, it is generally accepted that a player does not have to be on the best team in baseball to “deserve” MVP honors. However, there are certainly voters that are still beholden to a prior standard, meaning that Trout, who plays for the 65-66 Angels, could lose votes to Donaldson even if all things individual point in his direction. In addition, there is also recency bias at play here. With Blue Jays acting as the focal point of many conversations around the league while the Angels operate in relative obscurity, especially without Trout producing highlight-level performance on a nightly basis, Donaldson could start to accrue votes.

Is Mike Trout “dead” as an AL MVP candidate? Absolutely not. In fact, there is a real argument that he should still hold the lead at this point, especially when considering where the Angels would be without his presence – as opposed to the Blue Jays without Donaldson. Statistically, it is virtually a dead heat right now (outside of a substantial WAR edge for Donaldson), with the two players separated by only 10 points in wRC+ (where Trout actually leads) and more than a month’s worth of games for Trout to re-establish himself as the player to beat.

Trout’s performance at the (very) end of the month is certainly encouraging. He posted a 4-for-4 day at the plate on August 30 that included a double and a triple, and while he did not follow that with a monster game in the month’s final contest (0-for-4 with a walk), perhaps that penultimate contest will act as a springboard for the perennial AL MVP front-runner to return to his previous form. If he cannot recapture that level of magic, though, Mike Trout can look no further than August as the time period when he let yet another MVP award slip away.

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