The essential Angel falls to earth

Another bad team and another injury move Mike Trout, 32, closer to past tense.

Rod Carew never played in a World Series. Neither did Ralph Kiner. Neither did Ken Griffey Jr., Andre Dawson or Frank Thomas. Ernie Banks gets lots of sympathy, but Ron Santo and Billy Williams were left out too.

It’s not the club Mike Trout wanted to join, but then it’s an involuntary membership. You don’t really join it. It sort of captures you.

Trout learned that he had torn his meniscus the other night, and he’ll be out for a significant hunk of the 2024 season, not that it would have affected the Angels’ fate. It is the sixth time in eight years that Trout has missed major time. He has not enjoyed 500 at-bats in a season since 2016.

This just reinforced a popular interpretation of Trout’s time in Anaheim. He “wasted” his years next door to Disneyland, and the Angels should have dealt him long ago. Both opinions are baseless.

The 3-time Most Valuable Player of the American League has stubbornly dug his cleats into the Anaheim soil. He was supposed to flee to the Phillies, near his hometown of Millville, N.J. Or the Yankees would surely buy him off, to fulfill the Mickey Mantle comparisons he’s heard since high school. Instead Trout signed a six-year, $144.5 million deal with the Angels in 2015. After four of those years the Angels found a bigger bank and gave Trout a 12-year, $426.5 million haul that will take him through 2030. Both deals gave Trout full no-trade protection. By all accounts he remains happy with his bi-coastal life: sunshine and baseball, followed by home cooking and Sundays at Eagles games, where he has cheered from his end zone seats, with the proletariat, instead of hunkering down in a paneled suite.

The only problem is that Trout makes that trip East at the end of almost every September. His only brush with the playoffs happened in 2014, when the Angels were swept in a best-of-five by Kansas City. The Angels now have the longest playoff famine in baseball and, since they parted ways with Mike Scioscia after 2018, are working with their fourth manager, Ron Washington. The only thing worse than their judgment is their luck. They can’t develop starting pitchers, they have an insufficient talent-gathering operation in the Caribbean, and Anthony Rendon, their $245 million third baseman, is hurt yet again. With Trout out of the lineup and with Shohei Ohtani at Dodger Stadium, the Angels are not far removed from Quadruple-A. But Trout’s return will do little to save them. In fact, the only positive aspect of this hiatus will be the postponement of his decline.

Trout has 10 home runs, an American League high, leaving him 22 from 400. But he has only 14 other hits, and only three of those are for extra-bases. He is hitting .220 with 27 strikeouts and 16 walks. That suggests that Trout can still punish a mistake but can’t catch up to good pitches. Last year he hit .263 in 82 games with 104 strikeouts, and drove in 44. His strikeout percentage was 28.7, and his percentage of 95 mph-plus exit velocity was 41.5, both career lows. He received no MVP votes for the second time in three years.

Trout has stolen six bases this year, with Washington emphasizing the running game, but he’s only stolen 12 in his past five seasons. He turns 33 in August. Few 32-year-olds bear a great resemblance to what they were at 20, but Trout is an extreme case. When he was 20 he scored 129 runs and stole 49 bases, league highs in both categories. Back then, the most fun an Angel fan could have was to witness the duress a left-side infielder felt when he had to make a play on a grounder by Trout. There were no routine plays against his speed. He also hit 26 triples in his first three full seasons. As a 19-year-old he stood behind the batting cage in spring training with Scioscia, and they both watched an Angel send a hard shot to right-center. “You might be thinking ‘three’ on that one, right?” asked Scoscia. Trout just smiled. “Oh, I’m getting three,” he said.

Trout’s prime lasted from 2012 through 2019 and was unmercifully brilliant. Four OPS titles, four OBP titles, four runs titles, an RBI title, three walks titles, three slugging titles. He slugged over .600 for six consecutive seasons and was either first or second in MVP voting seven times. In 2018 he was intentionally walked 25 times. Last year it happened once.

Trout was also known for leaping and plucking baseballs out of the air before they became home runs, and causing extensive damage to helmets, slammed down by the deprived hitters. And he played with a near-constant smile, as if each day’s nine innings were an unexpected residual check, with no strings but bountiful music. The thrill might not be gone, but the fun is. His voice was cracking last week as he talked about his knee. It might be easier if there was a recurring condition that he could learn to manage, but his body has been attacked from all angles. In ‘17 it was a thumb ligament, in ‘18 a wrist inflammation, in ‘21 a calf strain that shut down his season on May 18, in ‘22 a rib cage injury and last year a fracture of the hamate bone in his wrist that allowed only two healthy days after July 4. From 2013-16, he missed only 16 games.

Mantle endured far deeper plagues. In 1951 he and Joe DiMaggio miscommunicated on Willie Mays’ fly ball in the World Series, and Mantle’s spikes got caught on an outfield drain cover. He lay there for what seemed like hours before the stretcher came. Some believe Mantle played the rest of his career on what amounted to a torn ACL. That was on top of osteomyelitis, which he suffered as a kid, and preceded serious problems with shoulder and hip.

Mantle retired when he was 36. Today’s knee surgeons would have kept him going long past 1968. Like Trout, Mantle started his career at 19, was a 3-time MVP, finishing second twice, led the league in runs five times and homers four times, led the league in walks five times and slugging four times, and was the OPS leader six times before anyone knew what OPS was. The parallels are unmistakable, except that Mantle didn’t play for the Angels. As a Yankee he appeared in 12 World Series.

Trout’s early feats give him plenty of cushion in Hall of Fame debates. He remains the only player ever with 200 homers and 200 steals as a 27-year-old, and he and Willie Mays are the only players ever with two seasons of a .320 average, 25 homers and 30 steals. There are reams of good-company stats like that, ones that link Trout with the likes of Musial, Bonds and Foxx. Still, Trout remains 376 hits short of 2,000, and at the moment his career batting average is .299, even though his career OPS of .991 leads all active players.

Nothing Trout did was a waste. The NBA has somehow fostered this notion that a player’s career is worthless if it doesn’t bring a ring which, among other absurdities, would mean Jack Haley was a greater success than Karl Malone. Trout plays a sport where even the most influential hitters only come to the plate 11 percent of the time. He was the reason why the Angels kept drawing 3 million fans without pennant races. There are no analytics to measure how many Orange County kids he inspired.

Should the Angels have traded him? Easy to make that case now, but owner Arte Moreno might have needed National Guard protection at the time. The Angels were lucky to get him in the first place, with an extra first-round pick they got in compensation because Mark Teixeira left them and signed with the Yankees. Trout then slid to No. 25 in that first round. He quickly became the best player in their history. No deal existed that would have given the Angels close to equivalent value.

Now Trout has been reduced to everyone’s common denominator. He has not stayed forever young. It would not be a surprise if he had a LeBron-style season in his future, but for the moment we’ll have to collate all our memories and stories and eyewitness accounts. Good stories, sure, but they were supposed to wait for our grandchildren.