THE LOCAL high school football season starts on Aug. 20.

It’s still July, but the local high school football season is just around the corner. It’ll be a brave new world for 2016 as the CIF-SS rolls out its very different playoff divisions and groupings based on previous records.

The season starts in late August, even before some local schools are open. Here’s a look at the openers for schools serving the Garden Grove-Huntington Beach-Westminster area.

• Garden Grove (Division 8): hosts Santa Ana Valley on Thursday, Aug. 25.
• Bolsa Grande (Division 13): hosts Laguna Beach on Friday, Aug. 26.
• La Quinta (Division 13): hosts Laguna Beach on Friday, Sept. 2.
• Los Amigos (Division 12): hosts Fairmont Prep on Friday, Aug. 26.
• Rancho Alamitos (Division 11): visits Savanna (at Glover Stadium) on Friday, Sept. 2.
• Santiago (Division 13): visits Sunny Hills (at Buena Park High) on Friday, Aug. 26.
• Pacifica (Division 10): hosts Trabuco Hills on Thursday, Aug. 25.
• Edison (Division 3): visits Baldwin of Wailuku, Hawaii on Saturday, Aug. 20
• Fountain Valley (Division 5): hosts Servite on Friday, Aug. 26.
• Huntington Beach (Division 7): visits West Adams (Los Angeles) on Friday, Aug. 26.
• Marina (Division 12): visits Dana Hills on Friday, Aug. 26.
• Westminster (Division 11): visits Garden Grove on Thursday, Sept. 1.
• Ocean View (Division 13): visits Brethren Christian (at OVHS) on Friday, Aug. 26.
• Orange (Division 13): visits El Modena on Friday, Aug. 26.

TROUT TOPS THEM ALL

It’s a fun pastime to compare athletes of different eras and argue about which was/is best. A lot of the discussion is emotional, but lately statistics are becoming a more common and perhaps, cerebral way of making comparisons.

MIKE TROUT is worth about 10 wins a year, according to one estimate (Flickr/Keith Allison).

FiveThirtyEight.com, a website best-known for using stats to predict the outcome of elections (they’ve got a pretty good record), recently posted an article by Neil Paine with the provocative headline of “Mike Trout’s Teammates Don’t Deserve Mike Trout.”

The hottest stat in baseball today is WAR, which stands for wins above replacement. That means how many more games does the team win with Trout in the lineup than it would if somebody else was in his place. WAR is popular because it factors in not just the usual slash line of batting average, home runs and RBIs, but also defense, baserunning, etc.

Ty Cobb, who some people consider the greatest player ever (we prefer Babe Ruth or Willie Mays), has the highest WAR score of all-time for players 24 and under). Trout is just three under that number. The article goes on to say that over the course of his career, he’s been the difference between the 86 wins the Angels averaged then and the 76 wins they would have had without him.

Or to put it another way, give the guy a raise. A big one. Where else can you buy 10 victories a year?