Mike Trout 40 HR / 140 BB seasons

Lore & Background

When Trout was drafted first overall in 2011, the Angels organization had just endured the post-Jeter, post-A-Rod era of the 2000s and was rebuilding around a young core. By 2012 he was already batting .369 and winning the AL batting title as a 21-year-old, but the 2014 season is the one that made the 40/140 mark feel like a target rather than a fantasy. He hit 41 home runs, drew 148 walks, and posted an OPS that would have been elite in any decade. He won the AL MVP in a unanimous or near-unanimous fashion, and for a stretch in the summer he was hitting .400-plus while pulling the ball into the right-field seats at Angel Stadium with a swing that looked almost lazy.

What made the 40/140 combination so remarkable to Angels fans is the context. The AL in 2014 was not a hitter's league by the standards of the late 2010s. The strike zone was not the expanded zone of later years. Trout was drawing 148 walks in a league where the average first baseman was drawing fewer than 50. That is not a power number; that is a patience number. And he was doing it while also clearing the 40-homer threshold, which meant he was not just waiting for his pitch — he was finding his pitch and doing extraordinary things with it.

The 2018 MVP season reinforced the narrative: 144 walks again, a 31-homer season that still produced a 1.000+ OPS. Fans began to treat the 40/140 line as Trout's 'signature' — the stat line that, if he hit it in a given year, meant the Angels had their best player in his absolute peak. It became a touchstone in every offseason discussion: 'Is he going to do 40/140 again?' became the question that defined the Angels' window of contention.

In Their Own Story

The scoreboard at Angel Stadium reads 3-2, top of the seventh, and the air smells like cut grass and the faint metallic tang of the Pacific off the coast. Trout is in the batter's box, green and gold uniform, number 27, and the pitcher has just thrown a 97-mph fastball that sits a hair too high. Trout doesn't swing. He doesn't even flinch. The umpire calls strike one. The crowd in the 300-level is murmuring, half the fans already reaching for their phones, the other half leaning into the railing with that particular Angels hope — the hope that says *he's going to do the thing again.* The next pitch is a slider, low and outside. Walk. Number 147 on the season. He adjusts his batting gloves, steps back, and the whole stadium exhales like it's one breath. He doesn't celebrate. He never does. But in the left-field dugout, a coach is already scribbling in a notebook, and somewhere in the front office a GM is refreshing a spreadsheet, and the kid in the batter's box is already thinking about the next pitch. That's the thing about 40/140. It's not one swing. It's 147 swings he didn't take, and 41 he did.

Reader's Guide

The 40 HR / 140 BB benchmark is best understood through the 2014 season, which is the year Trout most clearly cleared both thresholds in a single campaign. He finished with 41 home runs and 148 walks, a .341 average, and an OPS north of 1.080, earning the AL MVP award. The context matters: the 2014 AL was not a walk-friendly league, and Trout's 148 walks represented a massive outlier among position players. He was not a corner infielder padding his count; he was a center fielder with a 50-grade arm who could also hit the ball 41 times over the fence. That duality — elite range in the outfield, elite patience at the plate — is what made the 40/140 mark feel like a Trout-specific achievement rather than a generic stat line. It matters to Angels fans today because it represents the ceiling of what the organization's franchise player can do in a single year, and it anchors every conversation about whether the window is still open. When fans say 'he's having a Trout year,' they are invoking 40/140 without naming it. It is the standard against which every subsequent season is measured, and the one that reminds the fanbase that at his peak, Trout was not merely good — he was the best hitter in the game, full stop.

The 2018 season, with 144 walks and 31 home runs, is the secondary reference point. It did not clear the 40-homer mark, but the walk total was nearly identical, reinforcing that Trout's plate discipline was a permanent feature, not a fluke. Together, 2014 and 2018 form the twin pillars of the 40/140 narrative, and they are the seasons Angels fans point to when asking, 'Can he do it again?'

Did You Know?

• Mike Trout was selected first overall in the 2011 MLB Draft, making him the highest-picked player in Angels franchise history at the time.
• Trout won the AL MVP award in both 2014 and 2018, making him one of the few Angels players to win the hardware in consecutive decades of his career.
• The 2014 season in which Trout hit 41 HR and drew 148 BB also saw him post a batting average above .340, a triple-threat combination that is statistically rare in modern baseball.
• Trout's 2012 AL batting title at age 21 made him one of the youngest players in Angels history to win the award, setting the stage for the 40/140 seasons that followed.