Mike Trout voted Angels MVP by teammates, Dylan Bundy best pitcher

Death, taxes, and Mike Trout winning the Angels MVP award. These are the constants in our lives — even when everything else is out of whack in 2020. For the ninth straight year, Angels players voted Trout the team MVP, the team announced on Sunday.

Trout this season hit .281/.390/.603 with 17 home runs and 46 home runs in 53 games, and ranked fourth in FanGraphs WAR (2.6). That’s the most runs batted for Trout in the team’s first 60 games in his career. The 17 home runs are tied for the second-most for Trout through the Angels’ first 60 games of season along with 2015, trailing only the 19 homers he hit in the first 60 games in 2018.

Trout has played nine full seasons, so he’s batting 1.000 in the team most valuable player category. His nine team MVP awards are a franchise record by a country mile, ahead of the four won by Bobby Knoop and Garret Anderson, and the three Angels MVPs won by Tim Salmon and Vladimir Guerrero.

In his nine-year run as Angels MVP, Trout was the lone winner eight times, and shared the award with shortstop Andrelton Simmons in 2017.

The Nick Adenhart Award, given annually to the Angels best pitcher and also voted on by the players and named for the former Angels pitcher who was killed in a car accident in 2009, was won by Dylan Bundy.

Bundy was 6-3 with a 3.29 ERA in 11 starts this season. Bundy struck out 72 and walked 17. He finished in the top 10 in the American League in ERA, FIP (2.94), strikeout-to-walk ratio (4.23), Baseball-Reference WAR (1.8) and FanGraphs WAR (2.0).

Perhaps the biggest difference for Bundy this year compared to his days with the Orioles is in limiting the long ball. Bundy led the majors with 41 home runs allowed in 2018, and in his four full seasons in Baltimore averaged 28 homers allowed each year, one every 23 batters.

This year, Bundy allowed only five home runs in 11 starts, one every 53 at-bats.