The Millville Meteorite

There’s one thing that unites almost all great center fielders: They end their careers somewhere else. Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle, and Ken Griffey Jr. combined for zero defensive innings in center field in their last major league seasons. Even Willie Mays, the greatest of all time, who played 25% more innings at the position than anyone else, made 11 of his last 12 regular-season starts at first base. Maybe that’s how he knew it was time to retire.

So anyone with an iota of sense knew this was coming someday for Mike Trout. It’s been obvious since he arrived in the majors as a callow but wide teenager, looking more like Mike Alstott than Mike Cameron. And anyone who didn’t see the signs then surely got the hint as the injuries started to pile up. Trout last played more than 140 games in a season in 2016, last qualified for the batting title in 2020, and has missed an average of 96 games a season since 2021.

The Millville Meteor told reporters Monday that he’d recently met with GM Perry Minasian and manager Ron Washington to discuss — to borrow an idiom from basketball — load management. It would’ve been irresponsible not to.

Trout’s last defensive appearance anywhere other than center field came all the way back in 2013. He’s only ever DH’d 81 times in his career in total, and just 15 times over the past four seasons. But this year, Trout’s primary position will be right field, a position he last played as a rookie.

Now is as good a time as any to make the move. Trout turns 34 in August, and the Angels have not one but two younger players — Jo Adell and Mickey Moniak — who are capable of playing center field and can hit a little. At least in theory. Neither was very good last year, and Adell is just as injury-prone as the latter-day Trout, if not more so.

Shohei Ohtani’s departure before the 2024 season left the Angels’ DH spot unclaimed — hey, every cloud has a silver lining, right? — and though Jorge Soler should occupy that position for most of this season, Trout anticipates making the occasional start there.

Trout isn’t an ideal defensive fit for right. Even back in his early 20s, when he played like a cross between Mays and Captain America, Trout’s one relative weakness was his throwing arm. In 2023, the last year Trout played enough to register on Baseball Savant’s leaderboards, he graded out in the 75th percentile for arm strength and the 49th percentile for arm value. Trout’s hose, as it were, is not some useless vestigial noodle. If Corbin Carroll can play right field, so can Trout.

And even though nobody’s going to confuse Trout for Jose Guillen out there, you could say the same thing about Taylor Ward, the Angels’ other incumbent corner outfielder. If Ward and Trout are going to play the two corner outfield slots in some combination, I don’t think it matters even a little who goes where. Whatever makes them happy, I guess.

For that matter, I don’t think it matters even a little how good Trout is on defense.

He should be at least average in right field. Even after more than a decade’s worth of nicks and scrapes and more surgeries than you’d see in an entire season of Grey’s Anatomy, Trout is still really fast. In terms of range, he’s been at least average in center as far back as we have Statcast data. My expectation is that he’ll get to just about everything it’s possible to catch out there, even if his arm leaves something to be desired. He’s smart and experienced, and knows how to read a fly ball and which base to throw to.

Last year, 27 players spent 500 or more innings in right field. Excepting a couple hard cases — namely Nick Castellanos and Adolis García in his annus horribilis — the spread from the best defensive right fielder in the league to the worst was just 15 runs.

In 2024, Trout played just 29 games after tearing his meniscus. This is an injury that Trout, a Sixers fan, should know well. Joel Embiid has torn his meniscus three times in his career, most recently in February 2024, less than three months before Trout’s injury. Upon hearing that news, every Sixers fan I know looked to the heavens and cried out: “Please, God, take my meniscus to save Joel’s!” If the Almighty answered those prayers by smiting Trout, He must truly have it out for the Angels.

Where was I going with this? Oh, right. In those 29 games, Trout had one of the worst offensive runs of his career: .220/.325/.541. But the worst year of Trout’s career would be the best of almost anyone else’s. In just one month, he hit 10 home runs and was credited with 20 weighted runs created. The last time he played anything like a full season, in 2022, Trout produced 100 weighted runs created and 42.8 weighted runs above average in 119 games.

The point is: If moving to right field helps Trout stay healthy even a little bit, the Angels won’t care if he goes out there with his pants on backwards and an oven mitt on his left hand. It’s worth it to keep his bat in the lineup.

Will it? On one hand, Trout is still going to have to run a lot, and he’ll still face the risk of running into either the wall or Adell, which would probably hurt a lot and result in a stint on the injured list. But it will mean somewhat less running. Last season, center fielders made 27% more putouts than right fielders, and that’s not counting the additional sprinting required to back up throws on stolen base attempts or putout attempts on both corners.

Here’s how Trout put it, according to Rhett Bollinger of MLB.com: “I’m not gonna limit myself. I can still play the game hard. That’s the only way I know how to play. But just limit the overall beat down and the wear and tear. I think that’s best you can do.”

That seems like a reasonable and pragmatic viewpoint. Trout can’t eliminate the physical toll that baseball takes on him, but he can reduce it at the margins.

I want to end on this somewhat depressing note. Watching Trout move to right field is bittersweet. It’ll probably be good for him, and if it helps him stay healthy all year, not only will Trout and the Angels be better off, so will the sport of baseball and everyone who loves it.

I’ve made no secret of my affection for Trout, which has two sources, apart from the general respect due to someone who could at some point claim to be the best in the world at their craft.

First is local pride: Trout and I are both from South Jersey, a part of the world that wasn’t known for producing pro ballplayers until he came along. I’m not going to act like nobody makes it out of the old neighborhood alive or anything, but people from our corner of the globe grow up to be tomato farmers and ethically ambivalent lawyers and mediocre screamo musicians. Not Hall of Fame athletes.

Second: Trout also popped out of the ground basically perfect, right when we started to really understand what perfect looked like on a baseball diamond. He was one of the best hitters on the planet, one of the most selective hitters, one of the fastest runners, one of the most explosive athletes.

Trout, Mays, and Barry Bonds are the only three players in AL/NL history to have done all four of the following at least once in any season: Hit 40 home runs, steal 40 bases, bat .330, and walk at least 20% of the time.

Trout, Mays, and Bonds. That’s the kind of company he kept, like clockwork, for the first nine full seasons of his career. As much as he got many of the accolades he deserved — three MVPs and 11 All-Star appearances and counting, for God’s sake — I still think Trout is underrated.

Some of that is due to the Angels acquiring an even less precedented superstar midway through Trout’s tenure. If Trout was perfect, Ohtani showed that perfection was not the upper limit. Years of jokes about the Angels wasting Trout got subsumed into more of the same about them wasting Ohtani, too.

Now that they’ve been separated, Ohtani’s gone on to shine in the big moments that Trout’s never been able to reach. What a damning commentary on the Angels, but the biggest moment of Trout’s career was probably captaining Team USA to the 2023 World Baseball Classic final, where he came up short against Ohtani with the game on the line. And while Trout was recovering from knee surgery, Ohtani made the playoffs for the first time in his career and won the World Series on the first attempt.

At some point in the past four years, while Ohtani’s been in the spotlight and Trout’s been on the IL, the defining statement on Trout’s career has changed in temporal aspect: The Angels are no longer wasting Trout. They have wasted Trout.

Trout’s not done, of course. Assuming that his last two injury-plagued seasons are his new baseline and not a blip, Trout is still one of the 15 or 20 best hitters in the league. And every year of the string he plays out, at least until 2030, makes him $37 million richer. He’s going to be around for at least six more years.

But this is no longer the best player in the world. His shot at 500 stolen bases or 150 WAR is gone. It’s now merely likely, rather than a universal certainty, that Trout will end up hitting 500 home runs in his career.

This is Griffey on the Reds or Mantle with a first baseman’s mitt: An illustration of the limits of mortal man’s ability to stave off oblivion. The end isn’t coming; it’s here. But by moving to right field, maybe Trout can make it take a little longer.