Mike Trout’s injury during crucial stretch for Angels might cost him the chance to write a more fitting legacy

We all know the central baseball tragedy of the Los Angeles Angels.

They have employed the consensus best player in baseball for more than a decade, only to be continuously foiled in the goal of reaching even the postseason, much less the World Series. They have tallied only one postseason appearance — and zero postseason wins — in that span.

The longest-running holder of the title of “best player in baseball,” bearer of the grim burden, was Mike Trout. Now almost 32 years old and playing second fiddle to two-way teammate Shohei Ohtani, Trout broke the hamate bone in his left hand Monday and will miss at least a large chunk of the regular season that remains.

The next three months were shaping up to be the climactic stretch of the Angels’ Trout-Ohtani era. At 45-43, they are on pace for their first winning season since 2015, and they entered Wednesday only four games back of an AL wild card — close enough to keep Ohtani in town as he approaches free agency at season’s end, close enough to dream about all the waiting amounting to something more than memories of individual greatness and the good times had along the way.

Trout’s injury hobbles and muddles the Angels’ momentum toward some sort of ultimate redemption or heartbreak.

The most immediate, obvious effect is robbing the team of a still marvelous talent, one who ranks as a top-15 player in baseball even in the least impressive statistical season of his career. Another layer down in baseball’s narrative onion, Trout’s absence removes the longest-running main character from the stage and opens up the possibility that we might’ve been misunderstanding the baseball tragedy playing out in front of us all along.

The natural first 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 is going to carry them there! The problem, of course, is that the Angels’ recent existence laughs darkly in the face of that naïve notion.

The forces and whims of baseball can be cruel, and the foulest of the sport’s moods seems to have seeped into the soil in Orange County. Choose any lens, and zooming in on the Angels might drive you mad.

During the Angels’ postseason drought, so since 2015, Trout has been baseball’s most valuable player, even with his personal best seasons coming outside that frame. By FanGraphs’ estimation, 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 bridging in one season. In that same time, the Angels are 477-518 with Trout in the lineup, a 78-win pace, if rounding charitably. Without him, they are 135-152, a 76-win pace.

And if the past eight years or so didn’t do the trick, the past 30 days would work just fine as sour smelling salts. In June, Ohtani batted .394 with 15 home runs, three triples and four stolen bases, and he threw 30 1/3 innings with a 3.26 ERA. It might be the most impressive individual month in baseball history, yet the Angels went 14-13, their worst month of the season thus far.

As baseball writer Sam Miller once wrote after investigating how Trout might have changed the fortunes of the teams that passed on him in the MLB draft, “nearly every franchise in baseball’s trajectory … would have been radically different if they’d just drafted Mike Trout, and yet the one team that got him hasn’t reaped a damned thing.”

“Except,” Miller added, “for the insurmountable joy of getting 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 Angels fans, getting cut down by the random flying objects of the baseball arena. It’s Trout and Ohtani specifically.

"The biggest thing is getting to the playoffs," Trout told ESPN all the way back in 2020, before Ohtani achieved the full-throttle two-way form that has elevated him beyond the realm of even Babe Ruth being a realistic comparison. "You guys all see it. I see it. It sucks being out of it. It's time. We gotta get to the playoffs."

When the Washington Nationals won the World Series in the first season following Bryce Harper’s departure in free agency, the Ewing Theory popped up. Popularized by Bill Simmons, the idea homes in on teams built around a highly notable player that don’t achieve their goals, only to immediately attain team success once said notable player departs in free agency, gets injured or retires.

In Harper’s case, it was an emotional explanation where a very tangible one existed. The Nationals handed over most of Harper’s at-bats to a teenager named Juan Soto and used some of the financial resources they might have devoted to 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 got his cathartic October moment last season with the Philadelphia Phillies.)

But no matter how many times great players dispel this theory and similarly misdirected arrows of blame, the emotional weight of surprising team failure continues to be draped around the necks of players who had the least to do with the failing.

The tumultuous paths of Trout and Ohtani, then, are about to diverge — and not because of a blockbuster trade. Winning across baseball’s long regular season simply can’t be pinned on one player’s presence or absence, but we lack the capacity to accurately divvy up credit for the results of a game, a pastime, an entertainment endeavor. Just ask Ronald Acuña Jr., who is the MVP-caliber engine of a phenomenal 2023 Atlanta Braves team just two years after he was the star sidelined for the good parts of their 2021 World Series run.

Of course, the Angels occupy a bleaker range of the team-success spectrum. For years, they couldn’t assemble a competent pitching staff. Then they lacked a baseline level of talent in the supporting cast. General manager Perry Minasian has done well to duct tape over a great many of those holes for this final season with Trout and Ohtani under contract, but a rash of injuries is threatening even that tenuous stability.

However unfair the logic of the perception, the Angels’ next few months could prove pivotal in defining Trout’s legacy in a way that they won’t be for the 29-year-old, still-ascendant Ohtani. Trout — likely tipping toward his decline years, with no soft landing on another team in sight — might not get a better shot at October as a star player.

Stuck on the sideline for the next four-to-eight weeks, he will be relegated to bearing witness as the Angels do one of the following things:

1. Play so poorly in his absence that Ohtani is traded by August.

2. Slog through their familiar middle ground and miss the postseason as Ohtani’s potential exit looms.

3. Play so well that they burst into the postseason picture without him.

Trout has always been fighting baseball’s chaotic forces and the Angels’ failures, with his undeniable excellence on the field — the precision swings, the borderline takes, the thunderous bolts to first, the gleaming numbers — providing agency when very little about his team made sense. In the coming stretch, without those nightly reminders, Trout will be at the mercy of those forces.

Granted, there is a fourth option for how it could play out. Maybe, just maybe, the Angels will play well enough to retain Ohtani and remain in the race but not well enough to claim a postseason berth until Trout returns late in the season.

There is still hope for a storybook ending in this sport, for a glorious moment to clear the haze that obscures Trout’s greatness in the popular eye. The fact that it simultaneously feels so unlikely and so desperately necessary? Well, that’s the tragedy.