Baseball’s Best Hitter, For Now

Kevin Towers couldn’t have imagined that Mark Trumbo would start his D-backs days like this. The hottest hitter in the game has done a lot of swinging and not a lot of missing thus far. His five home runs are tops in baseball and through just nine games he’s already amassed 0.6 WAR, accounting for essentially 25% of his pre-season projected production. A .314/.368/.771 triple-slash line is good for a wRC+ of 218 in this very young season and without his work at the plate, who knows where the Diamondbacks would be right now.

But with the good comes the bad, and although I hate to say it, this is probably the pinnacle. There’s nowhere for the left fielder to go but down from here. Astute baseball fans know this as a season of production at this rate is completely unsustainable, even for Miguel Cabrera. But that’s not what I want to point out here, because it’s only logical that there’s a relative downward trend in Trumbo’s future. What I’d like to point out is a lot more concerning.

Trumbo has played essentially three big league seasons to date (2011-2013). Over that span, he’s compiled 452 games worth of data, an amount that provides a pretty stable sample. Sure, it’s not a decade of baseball, but it’s an amount that can start to show patterns, patterns that are worth looking for going forward, and since Trumbo’s off to such a great start, I thought I’d look and see if he’s done this before. Sure enough, in each of the past two seasons, Trumbo has gotten off on the right foot. See for yourself via his weighted runs created plus (wRC+):

Those are some pretty solid first months of the seasons. He’s well above average in each season aside from his first. How did he follow up those Marchs/Aprils?

Wow, he was also excellent in May in each of his three big league season prior to 2014. If history is to be trusted, or at least consulted, we shouldn’t necessarily expect him to fall of this pace in a devastating way any time soon. With the way the rest of the team is playing, that’s quite a relief.

But all good things must come to an end, and when Trumbo has fallen, he’s fallen hard, and usually in the second half of the season, particularly in the final months. Let’s see how each season has progressed (according to his offensive output only).

Trumbo’s 2011 campaign was a little up and down, but it was his first season in the majors and after a hot May, he held steady, then fell off at the end of the year. Who could blame the kid? It was s good debut season and I’m sure the Angels were hoping that he’d maintain the output for a full season in 2012, but that wasn’t exactly the case. He was absolutely electric in March, April and May before falling steadily until he was essentially terrible in August and September. 2013 was a similar story in that he started hot before dropping off the production. He didn’t have as pronounced of a drop but was below league average offensively every month June through September.

For reference, here are his offensive outputs for each month of the season in each of his first three big league careers.

So let’s see, we have a player with a career wRC+ of 113 who has essentially buoyed that average with two hot months a year. He’s been basically average or below for the other four months a year. If that’s not the very definition of feast or famine, I don’t know what is. Take a look at Trumbo’s career monthly offensive splits and you’ll see what I mean.

This is a pretty telling trend. There are three years worth of at-bats to balance out the ups and downs, but a consistent pattern remains. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Trumbo will rake for another 40-ish games, then decline, but it does suggest that such a decline may be on the horizon, but right now, we should just enjoy the ride.

For the Diamondbacks’ sake, I’d love his hot start to hold, but it’s just not possible. Rather than falling down a little bit, however, we should probably keep a watchful eye on history and see if he drops off in a big way when the summer hits. If that’s the case, the rest of the team had better get it’s act together because Mark Trumbo won’t be keeping them afloat. Instead, he may end up pulling them down.