Mookie Betts Has Become Mike Trout's Clone in Race for MLB's Best Player

Major League Baseball only has one Mike Trout, and he's hard to miss. Hint: He's the 6'2", 235-pound athletic marvel with two MVPs and a reputation as the game's best player.

Mookie Betts, however, is doing a surprisingly convincing job of trying to replicate Trout's formula for greatness.

The right fielder has had a bigger hand than anyone in the Boston Red Sox's hot start to 2018. Through 30 games, Betts leads MLB with a 1.252 OPS and 13 home runs. He already has two three-homer games on his ledger, one on April 17 and the other on May 2.

Betts is also giving the Red Sox his usual excellent defense and strong baserunning. The overall package has been worth 2.6 wins above replacement, according to Baseball Reference, which puts Betts here in the early rankings among position players:

• 1. Mike Trout: 3.1
• 2. Mookie Betts: 2.6

Yup. Right there. Closer than anyone to the Los Angeles Angels' mightiest hero.

Now, we've seen something like this before. Trout (10.5) and Betts (9.7) ranked first and second in WAR in 2016, which ended with them finishing in the same order in the American League MVP voting.

But even that wasn't enough to entertain a conversation about whether Betts was on Trout's level. That was mainly because Betts couldn't match Trout's offense, as the latter outpaced the former in OPS by 94 points, .991 to .897.

Things are different this time. Trout is among the many players Betts is beating in both OPS and homers. Since Betts at least rivals Trout in defense and baserunning, the only real advantage that Trout has at this point is that he plays center field, a premium position.

This isn't happening because Betts has literally transformed, Willow-style, into a Trout clone. He's only 5'9", 180 pounds, and his hitting still thrives on quick wrists rather than overpowered muscles.

But when you look closely at how Betts and Trout ply their trade, the similarities are striking.

Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images

If somebody like, say, Javier Baez is an extreme example of a hitter who prefers to swing at everything regardless of whether contact is assured, then Betts and Trout are extreme examples of hitters who prefer not to swing unless contact is assured.

Both are swinging at less than 40 percent of the pitches they see (36.2 for Betts and 38.9 for Trout) and making contact on better than 85 percent (87.7 for Betts and 86.3 for Trout) of their swings.

This puts Betts and Trout in an extremely exclusive patience-and-contact club that has only seven other members—namely: Jesse Winker, Jose Ramirez, Alex Bregman, DJ LeMahieu, Denard Span, Brett Gardner and Joe Mauer. And it's granting them entry to another exclusive club for hitters with a walk-to-strikeout ratio in the neighborhood of 1-1. Betts is at 14-13. Trout is at 28-29.

Then there's what separates Betts and Trout from the rest of the pack: power.

Trout has nothing to prove to anybody in this department. His 213 career homers have come courtesy of a swing that's both powerful and efficient. To wit, he's producing elite marks in average launch angle (19.9 degrees) and exit velocity (92.7 mph) so far this season.

Betts, on the other hand, has tended to float only slightly above the MLB average with his slugging percentage. So, perhaps it's suspicious that he's suddenly the best power hitter in baseball. 

However, this is not a case of a hitter who's doing the same ol' thing and ending up with different results. It's a case of a thinking man's hitter who's using his mind to get the most out of his body. 

"My at-bats are a little bit different. I don't really care about striking out that much," Betts told Evan Drellich of NBC Sports Boston. "I still want to [be] able to drive the ball with two strikes, the same way I do if it's 2-0. So I think I'm just keeping that same, aggressive, drive-the-ball mindset throughout the whole at-bat."

Betts' career-low 55.4 percent swing rate in two-strike counts underscores how he's not automatically going into protect mode in such counts. His career-high .685 SLUG% in two-strike counts underscores how well this risk/reward gambit is paying off.

Beyond that, Betts' actual application of what power he has is about as efficient as it could possibly be.

He isn't chasing outside pitches (i.e., on the outer third of the strike zone and beyond) as often as he did between 2015 and 2017. He's keeping the majority of his swings on the inner part of the plate. That's helping him take more frequent advantage of his pull side, which, like with most hitters, is his most powerful side.

To boot, Betts is also taking pointers from J.D. Martinez, who's notoriously all about hitting the ball high and hard with every swing.

"You guys know that I'm real big on [launch angle] and stuff like that, so I feel like he's kind of gravitated towards me in that direction," Martinez told Drellich.

Martinez's expertise is clearly rubbing off on Betts. His average launch angle is up to 21.4 degrees, and his average exit velocity is up to 93.2 mph.

That's a combination of loft and speed that's comparable to Trout and, well, really just one other hitter:

Data courtesy of BaseballSavant.MLB.com

The plot doesn't lie. Betts is right there in between Joey Gallo, who's hit more home runs than singles, and Trout, ostensibly the best player in the game, in terms of pure power output. 

Because Betts has only been doing this for a few weeks, it's only fair to have some skepticism about how long he can keep it up. It's also only fair to note that he has been known to run hot and cold. 

And yet, it says a lot about where Betts is at right now that he's not relying on Lady Luck or sabermetric technicalities to push Trout around on the best-player-in-baseball battlefield.

He's doing it because he really is that good.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.