We all know the central baseball tragedy of the Los Angeles Angels.
They’ve employed baseball’s consensus best player for over a decade, only to be continually outplayed with the goal of even making the playoffs, let alone the World Series. They’ve only had one playoff appearance — and no playoff wins — in that span.
The longest-serving holder of the title “Best Baseball Player,” carrying the sinister burden, was Mike Trout. Now nearly 32 and playing second fiddle to teammate Shohei Ohtani, Trout broke the hamate bone in his left hand on Monday and will miss at least much of the remaining regular season.
The next three months were shaping up to be the culmination of the Angels’ Trout-Ohtani era. At 45-43, they’re on pace for their first winning season since 2015, and they entered just four games behind an AL wild card on Wednesday – close enough to keep Ohtani in town as he nears the end. Free agency at the end of the season, close enough to dream of the whole wait amounting to something more than memories of individual greatness and the good times along the way.
Trout’s injury hinders and blurs the Angels’ momentum toward some sort of ultimate redemption or heartbreak.
The most immediate and obvious effect is to rob the team of a consistently wonderful talent, one that ranks among baseball’s top 15 players in even the least statistically impressive season of his career. Another layer in baseball’s narrative onion, Trout’s absence removes the oldest main character from the scene and opens up the possibility that we’ve misunderstood the baseball tragedy that’s been unfolding before us all along.
The first natural instinct, when Trout shook his hand and walked off the field after a swing, was to trumpet the fairy tale call for a worthy hero. If the Angels are going to make the playoffs, Shohei Ohtani will take them there! The problem, of course, is that the recent existence of angels laughs darkly at this naïve notion.
The forces and whims of baseball can be cruel, and the sport’s most fetid moods seem to have seeped into the soil of Orange County. Choose any lens and zooming in on angels could drive you crazy.
During the Angels’ playoff drought, so since 2015, Trout has been baseball’s most valuable player, even with his personal best seasons falling outside of that. According to FanGraphs’ estimate, only Mookie Betts is within 10 WAR of his total – a chasm that, among active players, only Trout, Betts and Aaron Judge have proven capable of closing in a season. Meanwhile, the Angels are 477-518 with Trout in the roster, a 78-game winning streak, if charitablely rounded. Without him, they are 135-152, a pace of 76 wins.
And if the past eight years or more haven’t done the trick, the past 30 days would work just fine as sour-smelling salts. In June, Ohtani hit .394 with 15 home runs, three triples and four stolen bases, and he pitched 30 1/3 innings with a 3.26 ERA. It might be the most impressive individual month in baseball history, but the Angels went 14-13, their worst month of the season so far.
As baseball writer Sam Miller once wrote after investigating how Trout could have changed the fortunes of teams that dropped him in the MLB Draft, “almost every franchise in the trajectory of the baseball…would have been drastically different had they just drafted Mike Trout, and yet the only team that got him got nothing.
“Except,” Miller added, “for the insurmountable joy of being able to watch him play every day, of course!”
Put it that way, and the story’s focus narrows a bit more. It’s not the Angels, or even the Angels fans, who get shot down by the random flying objects in the baseball arena. It’s Trout and Ohtani specifically.
“The most important thing is to get to the playoffs,” Trout told ESPN in 2020, before Ohtani hit the full-throttle two-way form that lifted him beyond the domain of even Babe Ruth. being a realistic comparison. “You all see it. I see it. It sucks to be out of this. It’s time. We gotta get to the playoffs.”
When the Washington Nationals won the World Series in the first season after Bryce Harper left in free agency, Ewing’s theory surfaced. Popularized by Bill Simmons, the idea relies on teams being built around a very notable player who fall short of their goals, only to immediately achieve team success once said notable player leaves for free agency, gets injured or retire.
In Harper’s case, it was an emotional explanation when there was a very tangible one. The Nationals handed most of Harper’s beats to a teenager named Juan Soto and used some of the financial resources they could have spent on Harper on Patrick Corbin and a pantry of secondary ingredients to produce a team that generated the right flash in the right pan at the right time. (For his part, Harper had his cathartic October moment last season with the Philadelphia Phillies.)
But no matter how many times great players dispel this theory and equally misdirected arrows of blame, the emotional weight of surprising team failure continues to be draped around the necks of players who have least to do with the game. ‘failure.
So Trout and Ohtani’s tumultuous paths are about to diverge – and not because of a successful trade. Winning throughout baseball’s long regular season simply can’t be tied to a player’s presence or absence, but we don’t have the ability to accurately apportion credit for a player’s results. game, a pastime, an entertainment activity. Just ask Ronald Acuña Jr., who is the MVP-caliber engine of a phenomenal 2023 Atlanta Braves team just two years after being the sidelined star for the good parts of their 2021 World Series.
Of course, the Angels occupy a darker end of the team success spectrum. For years they couldn’t assemble a competent pitching team. Second, they lacked a base level of talent in the supporting cast. General manager Perry Minasian has done well to tape many of those holes this past season with Trout and Ohtani under contract, but a string of injuries threatens even that precarious stability.
As unfair as the logic of perception is, the next few months for the Angels could prove instrumental in defining Trout’s legacy in a way that they will not for the ever-rising 29-year-old Ohtani. Trout – who is likely rocking back to his waning years, with no soft landing on another team in sight – might not have a better chance in October as a star player.
Stuck on the sidelines for the next four to eight weeks, he will be relegated to testifying as the angels do one of the following:
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Play so badly in his absence that Ohtani is traded in August.
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Walk their familiar middle ground and miss the playoffs as Ohtani’s potential exit looms.
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Played so well that they broke into the playoff picture without him.
Trout has always fought against the chaotic forces of baseball and the failures of the Angels, with his undeniable excellence on the field – the precision swings, the limit catches, the thunderous flashes at first, the brilliant numbers – providing agency when very little of his team made sense. In the next sequence, without these nocturnal reminders, Trout will be at the mercy of these forces.
Granted, there is a fourth option for how this might play out. Maybe, just maybe, the Angels will play well enough to keep Ohtani and stay in the game, but not well enough to claim a playoff spot until Trout returns late in the season.
There is still hope for a storybook ending in the sport, for a glorious moment to clear the haze that obscures Trout’s greatness in the public eye. The fact that it seems both so unlikely and so desperately necessary? Well, that’s the tragedy.