Actually voting on the AL Rookie of the Year is pretty much a formality at this point as Mike Trout's amazing rampage on the 2012 season virtually locked up the award by the All-Star Game.
Halos Heaven did a great job of putting into perspective just how great Trout's 2012 season has been, and how it hasn't just been "great", but Bonds-esque.
Lets start with the fact that Trout is enjoying a 10 WAR season, something no one has done since Barry Bonds was clubbing home runs pretty much every other at bat.
Quick explanation of what WAR means and the specifics of the math after the jump.
WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement, and simply means that a certain player with a positive WAR has added that many extra wins to a team's record over the course of the season. It is a solid attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to try and showcase a player's overall worth through a season.
As far as Angels rookies go, Trout is in a league of his own. He has an Offensive WAR of 7.4, and the closest person to him was Tim Salmon in 1995 with a rating of 6.9. Darin Erstad only mustered 5.5 in 2000.
But Erstad makes up a bit of ground in the Defensive WAR, where he garnered a 4.2 his rookie year. Mike Trout is *only* at 2.7.
When you add that up, Trout's 2012 WAR stands at 10.1. The next closest Angel -- Erstad at 8.2. That means that as good as Erstad was out there, you sub him out and put in Trout and over the course of the year he is almost personally responsible for the Angels winning two more games in a season.
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