The Futility of Trout
Mike Trout can still be baseball's best player, if healthy. But does it even matter?
Shohei Ohtani may no longer be a member of the Los Angeles Angels, but that doesn’t mean the Angels can’t still mark off at least a few items from their traditional “Tungsten Arm O’Doyle” checklist. In the season opener on Thursday, Mike Trout hit the first home run of the stateside portion of the 2024 MLB season, giving Los Angeles an early lead over the World Series contender Baltimore Orioles:
It was a sign that Trout, who has played only 237 of a possible 486 games the past three seasons, might be healthy and locked in for a huge year. So naturally, the Angels immediately fumbled away that lead and ended up losing 11-3, their 10th opening-day defeat in the past 11 seasons.
After the Angels miraculously came upon not one, but two generational players at the same time — in Trout and then Ohtani — one question always hung over L.A.’s repeated failures to capitalize on their greatness: How do you mess this up?
For years, I’d written about how Trout just needed better teammates. Then he gets Ohtani… and the Angels actually had a worse record during the combined Trout/Ohtani era (401-469, a .461 winning percentage) than they did during the Trout-by-himself era (590-544, .520).
How??
Some of that owed to Trout’s own decline in durability. As the God of WAR, Trout averaged 8.9 Wins Above Replacement per season from 2012 (his first full MLB campaign) through 2019, which was perennially enough to have him tracking to be the greatest player in baseball history through various different ages. But from 2020 onward, he’s only averaged 4.2 WAR per season, even if we prorate the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to 162 team games.
Because of injuries, the Angels really only ever got one or two vintage Trout-style seasons with Ohtani in the fold — and Ohtani didn’t really become 🐐 Ohtani 🐐until 2021, a season in which Trout missed 126 games. Yet, Trout continued to produce just like normal when he was healthy. From 2021-2023, only Aaron Judge (another oft-injured superstar) put up more WAR per game in the contests he actually played:
With the universe apparently collecting its overdue payments for the Angels’ magical 2002 World Series win, the irony was that just as one all-timer was ramping up to the height of his powers, the other was fading. If only they had been at their peak production together, what might have been!
Except, is that even true?
Let’s assume that, in some hypothetical alternate universe, Trout stayed fairly healthy and played his customary average of games per season — roughly 145 games in a 162-game schedule — during the seasons when Ohtani also took his turn toward superstardom. Let’s also assume Trout would have played at his usual WAR per game pace during those extra games, and that his extra WAR would add directly onto Los Angeles’ total (i.e., his replacements were literally replacement-level). It turns out that tacking on those extra wins from Trout would not have gotten the Angels into the playoffs in any of those seasons anyway:
This is the true nihilism of Angels baseball in the Trout (and Ohtani) era. Even without Trout’s injuries and his ill-timed decline from GOAT pace, which never quite gave L.A. the mega-tandem of peak legends it should have had, the Angels wouldn’t have gone anywhere anyway.
And now that Ohtani is gone, the true Sisyphean struggle begins.
Branch Rickey once told Ralph Kiner, “We finished in last place with you. We can finish in last place without you.” The Angels might feel the same way about seeing Ohtani go — it’s not like they were winning much with him, for all his brilliance. They can lose just fine without him. But games like Thursday remind us that Trout is now truly by himself, symbolizing the futility of even the greatest of men against the backdrop of a cold and unthinkably vast universe.
CORRECTION (Mar. 29, 2024, 6:39 a.m.): An earlier version of this article — and the email version — characterized Trout’s home run as the first of the entire 2024 MLB season. Several HRs were hit in the Padres-Dodgers series in South Korea last week, which I totally forgot (despite being excited for those games at the time) because I am an idiot. The text has been appropriately fixed.
Filed under: Baseball