It all started so swimmingly.
This statement could apply to both Mike Trout’s career and his 2024 campaign. It feels like an eon ago now, but the Angels icon went deep in his first at-bat of the season. He then outpaced all younger mashers in their prime, like Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, to become the first MLB player to reach 10 home runs in 2024.
Less than a week after his 10th homer, Trout abruptly went on the IL. He had experienced soreness in his knee, and a test revealed a meniscus tear. It was a devastating blow, but it wasn’t expected to be season-ending. Trout gradually rehabbed from knee surgery, got back to game-ready form, and began an assignment at Triple-A Salt Lake City on July 23rd. It lasted two innings.
More soreness emerged and led to an early departure from Trout’s planned four innings, and though initial MRIs were clean, a more recent scan revealed a new meniscus tear. He will undergo surgery again. Trout 2024 season is over after just 29 games, all before the month of May. The star is just as crushed as the rest of us.
Few players in the history of baseball can approach the sheer volume of Trout production from 2012, when he won American League Rookie of the Year, through 2019, when he polished off his third career AL MVP. During that timespan, Trout hit .308/.422/.587 with 245 doubles, 280 homers, 196 stolen bases, and a staggering 72.0 WAR, per Baseball Reference. That’s a higher total in eight seasons than Derek Jeter’s entire 20-year career, and though Trout is often compared to Ken Griffey Jr., even Junior’s eight-year peak from 1991-98 was 57.3 WAR.
Entire books will be written one day about this god-level run from Trout. As noted, he won three MVPs, but there’s a good case that he should have won at least three more. He could do anything on the field, robbing homers just as easily as taking a pitch out of the park himself.
There was nothing that Trout could do about the rest of the team around him, though. The core was good enough at the outset of his career, when the Angels narrowly missed the playoffs in 2012 before recovering from an off-year the next season to win 98 games and the AL West crown in 2014. Trout’s maiden playoff voyage lasted three games, as the upstart Royals upset the Halos in a three-game sweep that saw the MVP go 1-for-12.
The Angels have never sniffed the postseason since then, and they’re currently tied with the Tigers for the longest active playoff drought. What’s worse is that they haven’t posted a mere winning season since 2015, even with Shohei Ohtani aboard for most of those years as well. That streak will likely continue this year, as the Ohtani-less Angels are on their fifth different manager in seven seasons, currently hold a 47-61 record, and have little hope from the farm system, which FanGraphs rates as the very worst in baseball. Their owner is an incompetent, interfering miser who nearly rescued the franchise by saying he would sell it after 2022, only to renege on his decision a few months later.
Angels baseball would be somewhat more palatable with Trout around, but that has simply not been during the last four years. He was as productive as ever during the COVID-shortened 2020, when the Halos somehow still missed the postseason despite over half the league making it (including the sub-.500 Astros and Brewers). Off to a 1.090 OPS start in 2021, he suffered a mid-May calf strain on a seemingly innocuous jog to third base.
It didn’t look like the kind of injury that would cost Trout more than a couple months, but he never returned in 2021. The next year, he played through back pain and the diagnosis of a rare spinal condition (one that would affect his career) to appear in 119 games, albeit while missing over five weeks in midsummer.
Trout was healthy through the end of June in 2023 and earned his 11th career All-Star appearance. On July 3rd, however, a normal swing was rewarded with a hamate bone fracture in his left hand.
Trout made it back for one game, on August 22nd. Then on the same day that GM Perry Perry Minasian announced that Ohtani was done pitching in 2023 due to an elbow injury, he revealed that Trout would go back on the IL since the hamate still bothering him. He was eventually shut down and didn’t return.
The most agonizing part of all this is that when the dude is on the field, he can still rake! The future Hall of Famer’s remaining talent has shined through, as in 111 games since the start of 2023, he’s hit .252/.357/.504 with 28 homers and a 135 wRC+. Out of all 299 MLB players with at least 450 plate appearances since then, only 20 have a higher wRC+, and it ranks above perennial All-Stars like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., José Ramírez, and Pete Alonso.
Combining all his time missed this decade tells a bleak story, best illustrated by FanGraphs’ Jon Becker with a comp to another former MVP who can’t shake the injury bug.
Since the beginning of 2019, a season in which Giancarlo Stanton would go on to play just 18 games and Mike Trout appeared in 134:
Stanton: 463 games played
Trout: 453 games played— Jon Becker (@jonbecker_) August 1, 2024
I happen to still enjoy Stanton quite a bit when he’s on the field, but this is someone whose own general manager has said that getting hurt “seems to be part of his game.” If his body is responding better to injuries than yours, than that is a dire state of affairs. Hell, much-maligned Reds Era Griffey was healthier, too.
Where does Trout go from here? The Angels are still paying him $37.1 million per year from 2025-30 and he’s only 32, so he’s not about to retire or anything. Both Trout and Minasian (who honestly might be out of a job himself soon) are saying all the same things about being hopeful for next season. At minimum, a move out of center field to a corner spot seems to be in order, if not an outright transition to pure DH duty, à la David Ortiz and Nelson Cruz.
There’s no guarantee that this gambit will work because Trout’s injuries seem to be so painfully random. Nonetheless, he and the Angels need to try something different because the strategies of the past few years have failed over and over again. Running around in center isn’t the answer. If the Halos can’t put together a competent team, they need to do their best to at least try to get their star healthy. With even a modest second half of his career, Trout could have been perhaps the greatest player to ever play this game. Now, simply seeing him merely step into the batter’s box on a consistent basis would be a win. We just want a second half of his career at this point.
Get well soon, Mike, and please stay well if you can. We miss you.
