With Another Lost Season for Mike Trout, a Sobering Parallel Emerges

Mike Trout will not play baseball again this year. Last Thursday, Angels general manager Perry Minasian told reporters that the three-time MVP, who underwent surgery to repair the torn meniscus in his left knee on May 3 and who had recently begun a rehab assignment, had suffered another tear of the same meniscus. The 32-year-old slugger will need a second surgery, and once again, he’s finished for the season at far too early a point. Where we once anticipated speaking of Trout’s place in history alongside the likes of Willie Mays or Barry Bonds, his difficulties staying on the field during his 30s bring another superstar to mind: Ken Griffey Jr.

Trout played in just 29 games this season, the fewest in his career even including his 2011 cup of coffee. He was off to a flying start, albeit something of an uneven one, hitting 10 homers and stealing six bases. His home run total up to the point of his injury put him on a 55-homer pace, at the very least giving him a shot at topping his career high of 45 homers, set in 2019. Thanks to a more aggressive mindset, his stolen base total not only matched what he did from 2020–23 combined, it put him on pace for his first second 30/30 season; he hit 30 homers and stole 49 bases in his 2012 rookie season, then narrowly missed repeating in ’13 (27 HR, 33 SB) and ’16 (29 HR, 30 SB).

Despite those gaudy counting stats and the milestones they might portend, Trout was hitting an out-of-character .220/.325/.541, driven by an absurdly low .194 BABIP, 104 points lower than any of his seasons besides 2011, and 141 points lower than last year, when he played 82 games and totaled 362 plate appearances. His batting average and on-base percentage were respectively 43 and 42 points lower than the post-2011 career lows he set last year, but his .321 ISO was comparable to the marks he put up in 2017, ’18, and ’20 (he had 241 PA that year). Though he wasn’t hitting the ball as hard as usual, his .273 xBA and .599 xSLG suggest that he would have wound up in more familiar territory, slash line-wise.

Alas, this is the latest gut punch for a once-dominant player whose career has taken far too many such blows in the past. Since playing at least 157 games annually from 2013–16, Trout hasn’t played more than 140 in a season, for a variety of reasons:

Thumb, wrist, hamate, calf, back, knee, toes — every year it’s been a different injury for Trout, with many of them borne of rotten luck. He injured his left thumb sliding headfirst into second base, fractured his hamate while fouling off a pitch, and dealt with foot and back problems that — at least based on public reports — no other player has experienced. His recoveries have often seemed agonizingly slow, particularly as he’s aged, but the real shocker has been the abortive returns of the past two seasons.

Last year, Trout fractured his hamate on July 3, had surgery to remove the bone (a treatment that’s supposed to accelerate a return to play), then experienced such pain swinging the bat upon returning to the Angels on August 22 that he was shut down, and ran out of time to ramp up again. This year, for an injury that typically takes about four to six weeks to return from, Trout needed more than 11 weeks before he was able to head out on a rehab assignment, then played just two innings for the Angels’ Triple-A Salt Lake affiliate on July 23 before coming out of the game due to soreness in the knee. After trying to loosen the joint up the next day, he felt “a pop,” and then flew back to California for testing, throwing a wrench in the plans of my father and anyone else hoping to see him play for the Bees. An MRI taken that week showed no new injury, and on July 26, Trout said that doctors told him that the pain and the pop he experienced was from scar tissue breaking up.

The discomfort continued, however, and not just due to the injury. On July 28, when asked about Trout’s progress and particularly whether he had begun running again, Angels manager Ron Washington sounded more than a little exasperated: “It’s Mike, you have to talk to Mike. It’s all on Mike. How he feels, and if he can go out there. We can’t force him out there.” Those words didn’t wear well on social media, though in the full quotation, Washington provided more context. Per the Associated Press, he added, “He’s dealing with something… He’s never had a surgery like that. The scar tissue pop scared him. He’s going to ramp it up. I hope to have him soon. To put a timetable on it, I don’t have it. But I hope to have him soon.”

Still experiencing pain, Trout went for another MRI on July 31. This time, doctors found a tear in a new spot within his meniscus, requiring another surgery and ending his season. “Playing and competing is a huge part of my life. This is equally as heartbreaking and frustrating for me as it is for you, the fans,” he wrote in a social media post:

pic.twitter.com/BPt1KRh0XZ

— Mike Trout (@MikeTrout) August 1, 2024

Said Minasian: “Nobody wants to play more. Nobody cares about this building, this fan base, this team more than he does… He’s going to come back, have a normal offseason and come back next season and hit 70 home runs and win MVP. Book it.”

With the injury, Trout has now played just 266 games over the past four seasons. By the time this season is done, that will amount to just 41% of the Angels’ schedule for those four years, and 59% since the start of 2017, the equivalent of 96 games in a 162-game season. That’s a loss of more than three full seasons of playing time in an eight-year span. With six years and $212.7 million remaining on his contract, we surely haven’t seen the last of him, but it’s fair to wonder how much more we will see, and particularly how much more greatness is left in a body that’s been through so much.

Colleague Dan Szymborski provided some rather gloomy ZiPS projections to the Los Angeles Times‘ Bill Shaikin for an article that mused about whether this string of absences would impact Trout’s Hall of Fame chances. Shaikin, well aware of my work — which has included charting the points at which Trout reached the JAWS standard for center fielders in 2018 (when he was still 26 years old!), and became eligible for election based on the 10-year requirement — asked my opinion as well. Note that this conversation took place hours before Trout took the field in Salt Lake City, when his return to the Angels still appeared likely.

Given his three MVP awards and 11 All-Star selections, I don’t think Trout has anything to worry about with regards to the Hall, I told Shaikin. More:

“I can’t really imagine looking at what’s happened to him over the past several years and judging him so harshly that he would be deprived,” Jaffe said. “I could see him not being a unanimous selection or not being a 99.9% selection — maybe a 95% selection, because there are always some who think they should withhold their blessing, just as they do for anybody this side of Derek Jeter.

“But I don’t think it’s going to be a real obstacle to his selection.”

During our conversation, I noted that BBWAA voters have elected high-WAR players with more modest counting stats in recent years such as Larry Walker, Scott Rolen, and Todd Helton, none of whom came anywhere close to 3,000 hits or 500 home runs. I also compared Trout to Griffey. “His attendance was sporadic in his 30s,” I told Shaikin, referring to Griffey’s injuries, “but everything he did in his 20s really got him in that position.”

A refresher is in order. Griffey, who like Trout debuted in the majors as a 19-year-old, played in 88.7% of his team’s games during his first 12 seasons (1989-2000), a span covering his entire tenure with the Mariners and his first year with the Reds, his age-30 campaign. By that point, he had made 11 All-Star teams, won an MVP award, and finished in the top five in the voting four other times, but he also landed on what was then the disabled list four times during those years. He missed 26 days due to a fracture in his right hand in 1989, 16 in ’92 due to a right wrist sprain, 80 in ’95 due to a left wrist fracture (suffered while making a spectacular catch against the outfield wall), and 23 in ’96 due to a hamate fracture, for which he underwent surgical removal.

With the Mariners unwilling to sign Griffey to the long-term megadeal he sought, the team traded him to the Reds — the team for which his fatehr starred — on February 10, 2000 once he agreed to a record-setting nine-year, $116.5 million contract. But after playing 145 games in his first season in Cincinnati, Griffey began to break down in alarming fashion. He played just 111 games in 2001, missing 47 days due to a left hamstring strain, and then just 206 games from ’02-04 due to injuries to his right hamstring (three separate stints), right patella, right shoulder, and right foot. For that four-year span, he played in just 48.8% of the Reds’ games, an average of 79 per year. From 2005–08, he was more durable, averaging 131 games a year but missing time due to injuries to his right hamstring (again), right foot (again), and right toe; he still had power, but his defense and therefore his overall value eroded considerably.

By the end of that stretch, Griffey was through his age-38 season and had declined to the point of becoming a league-average hitter whose poor defense offset even that value. With his contract set to expire after 2008 (picking up his $16 million club option was a moot point), he was traded from the Reds to the White Sox, which allowed him to reach the postseason for just the third time in his career. After that, he returned to Seattle for a victory lap that lasted about one year and two months; he was nudged into retirement in June 2010, when he was hitting .184 without a homer in a part-time role that had been further reduced after he was caught napping in the clubhouse during a game.

Griffey finished his career with impressive counting stats: 630 home runs, 2,781 hits, and 83.8 WAR (the Baseball Reference version, which I’ll use through the rest of this piece). Yet there’s little question that if he’d stayed healthy — and if the 1994 players’ strike and ’95 lockout hadn’t occurred — he would have gone much higher, possibly even reaching 3,000 hits and 700 home runs.

Right now it’s tough to see Trout even getting to Griffey’s actual hit and home run totals given his own ailments. He has 1,648 hits and 378 homers through his age-32 season, a point at which Griffey had 2,039 hits and 468 homers. Yet Trout not only already has 86.0 WAR, but he blew past Griffey in the JAWS center field rankings in late 2019, taking over fifth place before his 30th birthday. He’s still in fifth, but despite having the third-highest peak score for the position at 65.1 — trailing only Mays’ 73.5 and Ty Cobb‘s 69.0, and barely ahead of Mickey Mantle’s 64.7 — he’s got his work cut out for him to reach Mantle’s 87.5 JAWS. In fact, he’ll need about another 23.9 WAR to do so, which right now appears to be a long shot.

Rather than simply citing Dan’s rather depressing projections unadorned, I asked him to run some rest-of-career ZiPS projections for Griffey to illustrate how his projected final totals fluctuated, and then to do the same for Trout. We’ll start with a projection following the 1994 strike, Griffey’s age-24 season. With 40 homers through the Mariners’ first 112 games, he was in hot pursuit of Roger Maris‘ single-season home run record of 61:

That’s pretty close to spot-on for Griffey’s actual final hit total, short in the homer department, and way short in the value department due to the greater-than-expected decline of his defense. Though he won 10 Gold Gloves and was tremendously valuable early in his career — leading the league in WAR three times with a high of 9.7 in 1996, and finishing second twice as well — he remained in center field for far too long; in fact, he was at least 10 runs below average seven times in the nine seasons from 1999–2007 despite missing so much playing time. He should have become a corner outfielder early in his career in Cincinnati, though serving as the designated hitter for an AL team would have been a better fit, since the NL only used it for away interleague games.

Here’s where things stood after 2000, just before Griffey’s legs began falling apart:

The projected final hit total is even higher; I’m not sure what Griffey’s odds of reaching 3,000 were at that point, but he had a shot, and likewise with respect to 700 or even Babe Ruth’s total of 714 for the homers. Whatever his odds at those milestones were, they were crushed by his 2001–04 absences. During those years, he managed just 273 hits and 63 homers, and his ceiling practically fell on his head as though he were swinging from the chandelier, à la Bumblebee Man:

From that point, ZiPS not only projects Griffey to fall well short of 2,500 hits and 600 homers but to produce just 1.8 remaining WAR in dribs and drabs spread over five seasons of part time play. Thankfully, in 2006 and ’07 alone he was productive enough to exceeded those remaining totals while playing in 253 games, which improved his outlook for the remainder of his career:

Griffey ended up falling short of those final projected numbers save for the WAR. But beyond the projections, it’s worth remembering that he actually rebounded from that brutal four-year stretch with a couple of comparatively productive years that paved the way for him to finish out his contract largely unimpeded. I don’t want to overstate the value of those years; he netted just 0.6 WAR in 2006–07 due to his defense, which was a honkin’ 19 runs below average even as he shifted to right field. From 2002–10 he totaled just 5.7 WAR while padding his counting stats to the point that he was a near-unanimous pick for the Hall, setting a record with 99.3% of the vote (437 out of 440) on the 2016 ballot

All of that is worth bearing in mind when we see what’s happened to Trout’s projections. Here’s how the future looked after he won his second MVP award in 2016:

At the time, Trout projected to blow past 3,000 hits, approach 700 homers, and finish with a WAR in Mays-Cobb country — the sixth-highest total of all time, including pitchers. But by the time he brought home his third MVP award to cap that trio of shortened-but-still-exceptional seasons — during which he averaged 129 games, 39 homers, and 8.2 WAR — his ceiling had fallen, too:

Still, 600 home runs is a plateau only nine other players have reached, and when you combine that with 300 stolen bases, the company is even more impressive: Mays, Bonds, and Alex Rodriguez. Unfortunately, the pandemic-shortened season and Trout’s first real writeoff one with the calf injury not only made that combination appear to be unattainable, it lowered his final WAR projection by more than 30 wins:

From the post-2016 projection to the post-2022 one, the forecast for Trout’s final totals fell by 864 hits, 156 homers, and 49.7 WAR. Unfortunately, as we now know, things haven’t gone great since then, and those totals have fallen even further:

Ouch. Trout now projects to fall short of the 500-home run mark and to barely cross the 2,000-hit one, which as I’ve noted several times in this space has been all-important when it comes to voters, as it has serves as a proxy for career length and productivity. Until the election of Tony Oliva via the 2022 Golden Days Era Committee, no player whose career took place entirely in the post-1960 expansion era had been elected by either the writers or the committees. I do believe more exceptions are on the way, as Dick Allen (1,848 hits) and Andruw Jones (1,933) have gotten close to election, and Chase Utley (1,885) made a stronger debut than I anticipated, though the one I’m really waiting for is 2027 candidate Buster Posey (1,500).

Given the length of his contract and his drive to compete, I strongly suspect Trout has more than 363 hits and 67 homers left in him even if ZiPS does not. Whether he collects those with the Angels or another team is less my concern, though I don’t think there’s a soul on earth who would begrudge him a fresh start in another organization, with another set of doctors and trainers, to say nothing of teammates and executives.

Before this ridiculous and soul-crushing string of injuries, and before he began to be overshadowed by teammate Shohei Ohtani, Trout appeared as though he would wind up on the shortest of lists of the greatest players of all time, in the company of Ruth, Mays, Bonds and maybe just a few others. On a prorated basis, he still has a case, as he’s averaged 9.2 WAR per 162 games, higher than Bonds (8.8) or Mays (8.4) if not Ruth the position player (10.5), though that last grim ZiPS projection above would drop him to 7.9. In the end, if he merely winds up in the company of Griffey or Albert Pujols — another Angel with a disastrous contract for the back half of his career — he’s still going to be remembered for putting together an absolutely jaw-dropping decade-plus of pure greatness, and while at times we’ll lament what might have been, that will be enough.