Mike Trout Is Probably Staying in Anaheim

After Anthony Rendon revealed that he had indeed suffered a fractured tibia and not a bone bruise, and after Shohei Ohtani cleared out his locker to undergo surgery to repair his torn ulnar collateral ligament, there really was only one more insult to add to the injuries that have defined the Angels’ 2023 season. On Sunday, the team transferred Mike Trout to the 60-day injured list due to continued setbacks in his recovery from wrist surgery, officially ending his season and opening the door to questions about his future with the franchise.

Trout fractured his left hamate while fouling off a pitch on July 3. He had surgery to remove the bone — a treatment that’s supposed to accelerate a return to play — two days later, and was expected to be sidelined for four to eight weeks. He returned on August 22, about seven weeks after surgery, but while going 1-for-4 with an infield single, he felt significant pain in his left hand when hitting and returned to the IL. Though he still hoped to play this season, he ran out of time.

“It’s frustrating,” a visibly emotional Trout told reporters in a media session on Sunday. “It’s been hard on me… It kills me not being out there. I’ve got a lot left in my career, and I can’t just sit around here and mope around. I’ve got to have that positive mindset.”

“Coming into this season, the biggest thing was trying to stay healthy. That was my goal,” he added. “I hired a lot of people [this past offseason] to work on my body. My body felt great. A freak thing happened and I broke my hand.”

The 32-year-old Trout wound up playing in only 82 games and hitting .263/.367/.490 with 18 homers, a 134 wRC+, and 3.0 WAR. That’s a great half-season for most players, but for Trout it was a significant step down, with career-low rate stats across the board. He never had a chance to reap the full benefit of emerging from the uncharacteristic slump that he had slipped into at the start of June:

That’s a 5-for-45 showing with 12 walks in the first stretch, a lot of hard-hit balls but just two barrels. The second stretch is something much closer to peak Trout, a bittersweet reminder of a stellar season that might have been, not only for the slugger but for the Angels, who were 45-42 when he went down. They’re 26-45 since that point, one game better than the A’s (25-46) and three better than the White Sox (23-48) as the AL’s worst in that span — and most of that came while the team was actively trying for a playoff spot while employing the best player on the planet, Ohtani.

Alas, this is now the second season-wrecking injury for Trout in the past three and the fourth full season in a row in which he fell short of playing in even 140 games. He was limited to 134 games in 2019, missing the final 19 of the season to undergo surgery to address a Morton’s neuroma in his right foot, though he still took home his third AL MVP award. After playing in 53 games out of 60 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season (four of the missed games were due to paternity leave), he played in just 36 in ’21 due to a calf strain, and was limited to 119 last year due to T5 costovertebral dysfunction, a rare back condition causing “abnormal loading of the joint between the rib and the middle of the upper back (thoracic spine).” By season’s end he will have appeared in just 60% of the Angels’ 708 games since the start of 2019.

Trout has been elite in that span when available. His 167 wRC+ (.285/.402/.602) is second only to Aaron Judge’s 169, and he’s even 11th in WAR (21.1) over that same span; on a prorated basis, he’s averaged 7.8 WAR per 650 PA, superlative stuff. With three MVP awards and the fifth-highest JAWS among center fielders, he’s already a lock for the Hall of Fame, but his ongoing absences are costing him milestones, as well as shots at returning to the postseason for the first time since 2014. Not that he can do it singlehandedly for a team that has clinched its eighth sub-.500 season in a row.

Inevitably, on Sunday Trout was asked about his future with the Angels. He said he plans to meet with owner Arte Moreno and team president John Carpino after the season, “the same thing I’ve done the last 13 years,” but fully expects to be an Angel next season.

“I’ve got seven years left on the contract,” said Trout. “There’s a lot of speculation out there. And like I said, I come in every year, I sit back two to three weeks, enjoy the family, clear my mind and then have conversations with the front office every single offseason. Nothing’s changed.”

Trout is owed $248 million for those seven seasons, and the sad fact for the Angels is that trading him now wouldn’t be easy. Not only would they need Trout to waive his full no-trade clause, but even if they significantly paid down his remaining salary, it’s tough to see their return providing the facelift the franchise needs.

To get an idea of where Trout’s career is at, I asked Dan Szymborski to provide the ZiPS projection for the remainder of his deal. I could practically hear Dan’s brow furrowing as he typed his reply: “Between age and health, ZiPS is becoming increasingly grumpy.” Here’s a look:

The years through 2030 are the ones covered by his current contract, and you can see that it’s not all that pretty a picture, with Trout declining towards and then below average by the end, with significantly reduced playing time based on his penchant for injuries. As you can see from that “Thru 2030” row, he projects to land at 499 home runs, and as Dan noted recently in his piece on Freddie Freeman’s pursuit of 3,000 hits, ZiPS includes an algorithm that reduces playing time less as a player nears a significant milestone, so you can see that even as the projection has him slipping to replacement level in his late 30s, it projects him to pad his numbers a bit as he prolongs his career.

Aside from the homers and — more importantly — the 100 WAR, which would put him 22nd all-time, those don’t read as the kind of inner-circle Hall of Fame numbers that would put him in the same sentence as Willie Mays and Barry Bonds, the kind of company we were talking about at his peak. Trout wouldn’t even surpass Mickey Mantle for fourth place in JAWS among center fielders (110.2/64.7/87.5 for Mantle, 100.2/65.1/82.7 for Trout) though their proximity and similar counting stats (2,415 hits and 536 homers for the Mick) would amplify the long-existing comparisons between the Commerce Comet and the Millville Meteor, as well as the reminder that they had the talent but not the longevity to reach even bigger totals.

The ZiPS valuation of those seven years is just $127 million, about half of what Trout is being paid, so you would have to imagine Moreno writing a Steve Cohen-like check in order to get significant talent in return for a trade. Here I’m thinking of Justin Verlander, whose trade to the Astros at this year’s deadline included $35 million of guaranteed money towards next year’s $43.3 million salary plus another $17.5 million if his conditional player option for 2025 is reached and exercised, in exchange for two prospects (who were graded as a 50 FV and 45 FV, via Eric Longenhagen). Given the length of Trout’s remaining deal, a more apt parallel is the January 2021 Nolan Arenado trade between the Rockies and Cardinals, though the comparison only goes so far.

The Rockies dealt Arenado, who was coming off his age-29 season and was owed $199 million over six years, plus $51 million in exchange for a five-player package that Longenhagen described thusly: “They’re 40 FV prospects who I think can be big league role players, but none are potential stars, and there may not even be a regular among them.” Three seasons later, he’s yet to be proven wrong on that score. The return was headlined by Austin Gomber, a back-end starter, and of the other four players included, only corner infielder Elehuris Montero has played in the majors; he’s been replacement-level thus far. The book isn’t closed on the other three prospects, only one of whom has cleared A-ball, but none even cracked the Rockies Top 44 Prospects list in late June. Even before we account for the fact that Arenado was younger than Trout, had a more robust projection (it eyeballed at around $128 million for six years), and had a complicating opt-out in his contract after 2021, I don’t think you could call that a compelling return.

In further discussions with Dan, he provided an alternate ZiPS projection, one that assumes Trout receives more playing time by clearing out the injury flags he’s built into the system. Under that rosy scenario, his rest-of-career projection looks like this:

In this best-case scenario, the ZiPS valuation of Trout’s seven remaining years under contract is $206 million, still well short of the actual money but only about a 20% overpay, which isn’t uncommon for a superstar-level contract. For example, the estimate for Judge’s $360-million deal with the Yankees came to about $10.3 million per win, where this is more like $11 million. Still, given Trout’s recent injury history, the chances of him reaching this ceiling are remote, and it’s very difficult to imagine any team trading for him at a level that assumes such a projection is something closer to the 50th percentile outcome rather than the 90th.

If we do want to play pretend for a moment, this scenario pushes Trout to 17th in career WAR, between Mantle and Frank Robinson (107.3), though even with a JAWS of 86.8, he doesn’t pass the former in the center field rankings. Depending upon whether you pick the hang-around path or not, he comes in with a home run total that would put him 17th, between Mike Schmidt (548) and David Ortiz (541), or 13th, between Harmon Killebrew (573) and Rafael Palmeiro (569). Good company, but not befitting the peak that we were lucky enough to witness. Again, we’re talking about Trout’s ceiling, and I don’t think we need to retrace our steps to when he signed his 10-year, $360 million extension in March 2019 — at which point he was viewed as “leaving money on the table” by forgoing free agency — to know that’s a much lower ceiling than he had for his career achievements as of just a few years ago.

Long story short, unless Trout definitely wants out of Anaheim and forces the Angels’ hand in a highly uncharacteristic manner, I don’t see him getting dealt this winter, particularly because his value is at such a low ebb. Even if you can imagine the Angels and their trade partners finding a middle ground somewhere between the two ZiPS scenarios above, and Moreno pinning a very fat check to the slugger’s jersey, the yield in prospects or young players would probably make less difference to the Angels’ competitive fate than the freedom from some significant fraction of that $248 million. I don’t think it would make Ohtani’s return any more likely, and given the sagas of Rendon and Albert Pujols, I’d worry more about where Moreno spends the savings. So at this juncture, I expect Trout and the Angels will remain wedded to each other, for better or worse.