The Latest Mike Trout Bummer Could Produce His Longest Absence

The injury bug is biting all too often these days, and this week, it has taken a chunk out of Mike Trout’s season. Off to one of the best starts of his career, the 29-year-old center fielder strained his right calf in Monday night’s game, an injury that will sideline him for six to eight weeks — potentially the longest outage of his career — greatly reducing both the chances that the Angels will make the playoffs and that Trout will claim his fourth MVP award.

As if we needed more proof that the universe is a random and uncaring place, Trout suffered the injury doing something that turned out to be entirely routine and inconsequential: running the bases on a two-out popup by Jared Walsh. The play took place at the end of the first inning of the Angels’ game against Cleveland, after Trout had walked and taken second base on a wild pitch. You can see from the overhead video that by the time he reached third base, he was visibly limping:

Trout left the game, underwent an MRI on Tuesday, and was diagnosed with a Grade 2 calf strain. “I thought I got hit by a line drive,” he told reporters in describing his injury. “And then I got to the bag and then I said, ‘Man, something’s not right.’ And then I felt a pop and then I went down to the tunnel, made sure it wasn’t my Achilles, so I mean, I guess if there’s any positive coming out of it, it’s that it wasn’t my Achilles because that’s what scared me when it first happened. It was just a freak thing.”

That freak thing has struck Trout down at a time when he’s hitting .333/.466/.624 while leading the majors in on-base percentage, wRC+ (198), and WAR (2.5). He led the AL in slugging percentage at the time of the injury, but teammate Shohei Ohtani overtook him on Tuesday night thanks to his third straight game with a homer.

Despite missing three games in late April after being hit on the left elbow by a pitch, Trout had put together the best opening month of his career, hitting for a 255 wRC+ (.425/.523/.781) in 88 PA while drawing the wonderment of the baseball world as to how the game’s best player could possibly be getting better. Via the Los Angeles Times‘ Jack Harris:

Trout spent the spring refining his swing. He practiced on a drill also used by Shohei Ohtani to keep his body square and his swing on time. He worked on making his mechanics in the cage more similar to his stroke in the game.

His main objective was simple.

“For me, it’s just being on time, getting that foot down, not trying to do too much,” Trout said. “It all starts with getting that foot down. When it’s not down, I don’t recognize pitches, the chase rate goes up. Just being on time and recognizing pitches is big for me.”

One thing that stood out for Trout in the early going was his aggressiveness. He swung at 41.1% of all pitches in April, a bit above the 36-38% range of his previous four seasons. He produced a batted ball on the first pitch of his plate appearance 12 times in the season’s first month and connected for seven hits, including three doubles and two homers. His 13.6% rate of putting the first pitch in play (or homering) was more than double his 2020 rate (6.6%); he’s never had a season with higher than 7.7%. He had reined in that aggressiveness since the calendar flipped to May, with his seasonal swing rate dropping to 39.5% (0.1% below a career high set in 2012), and his first-pitch percentage dropping to 8.2%. Meanwhile, he cooled off to the point of relative mediocrity, though his .182/.379/.364 line in 58 PA this month still amounts to a 113 wRC+.

Even with that downturn, Trout’s numbers are off the chart. Despite hitting groundballs at a higher rate than any season since 2012 (42.1%), he’s hit for a wRC+ 11 points ahead of any of his full season marks. His .456 BABIP is unreal but also unsustainable; the highest BABIP by a qualified hitter in any season from 1901-2019 is 33 points below that, and even if we drop the threshold to 400 PA — perhaps a more realistic target for Trout given his injury — it’s rare for a 21st century player to top .400:

Taking his ups and downs together, only once has Trout had a higher wRC+ through the Angels’ first 40 games:

That 2017 season, Trout’s best showing at the one-quarter mark, sticks out like a sore thumb in his career because, well, he missed 39 games that season due to a torn ligament in his left thumb that required surgery. His total of 114 games that year isn’t just a full-season low, it broke a streak of four straight seasons with at least 157 games played. Trout hasn’t played more than 140 games in a season since; he missed 105 games for various reasons from 2017-20, about 19% of the Angels’ total. He missed 19 games in 2018 due to right wrist inflammation, and the final 19 of the ’19 season due to season-ending surgery to address a Morton’s neuroma in his right foot, though that didn’t stop him from winning his third AL MVP award. Healthy last year, he played in 53 of the Angels’ 60 games, with four games of paternity leave in early August his only absence of note.

Now he’s potentially facing the longest absence of his career. If he were to return exactly six weeks from Tuesday, on June 29, he’d miss 38 games, one fewer than in 2017. If his absence stretches into July, he’ll have set an unenviable personal record, and quite possibly eliminated himself from contention for a fourth MVP award, as only one non-catching position player has won while playing 120 games or fewer over the course of a full season: George Brett in 1980, when he hit .390 in 117 games.

Of course, the bigger deal than the hardware is what this does to the Angels, who despite the heroics of Trout, Ohtani, and Walsh (who’s hit for a 167 wRC+) are a disappointing 18-23 at this juncture, due in significant part to the majors’ worst defense by DRS (-28) and defensive efficiency (.657, nine points worse than any other team and 41 points below the major league average). Their outfield already lost Dexter Fowler for the season due to a torn ACL and Walsh to a move to first base to replace the departed Albert Pujols. They’ve received subpar offensive performances from left fielder Justin Upton (97 wRC+) and a host of fill-ins including Taylor Ward (61 wRC+ in 50 PA), Juan Lagares (64 wRC+ in 27 PA), and superutilityman Jose Rojas (63 wRC+ in 86 PA). Scott Schebler, who started in center field when Trout was out with his elbow contusion, was recently outrighted to Salt Lake City. Ward, who’s hit just .207/.277/.347 (72 wRC+) in 347 major league PA so far, made the first start of his nine-year professional career there on Tuesday and will get the bulk of the playing time there, with help from Lagares. It’s not great.

As for Jo Adell and Brandon Marsh, they’re the future of the Angels’ outfield in some configuration with Trout, but both are getting much-needed seasoning at Salt Lake City, the former after a rough big league debut last season, and the latter in his first taste of Triple-A. The team has no immediate plans to call either one up.

Trout’s loss nearly cut the Angels’ Playoff Odds in half overnight:

The Angels, who by our estimate had a 39.5% chance at the outset of the season — their highest at that point since at least 2016 — had fallen to 23.5% heading into Monday, where now they’re down at 12.8%. Their odds of winning the AL West had fallen from 23.8% as of Opening Day to 9.8% before the injury to 4.4% now. While Ohtani will keep the team relevant for viewing purposes, Trout’s injury nearly guarantees another October without the game’s best player.