If these are the last days of six thrilling but empty years of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani as Angels teammates, the Fourth of July will stand as the most disheartening. Just hours after Trout landed on the injured list with a fracture in his hand that will keep him sidelined for one to two months, Ohtani left his losing start against San Diego with a blister on the middle finger of his throwing hand.
Joey Chestnut’s digestive tract had a better day.
Oh, and Los Angeles third baseman Anthony Rendon also left the game after fouling a ball off his shin, which led to him needing crutches in the clubhouse. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s $105.7 million in 2023 salaries knocked out in one game. So it goes with the bedeviled Angels.
Two weeks ago, the Angels held a wild card position and were eight games over .500. Since then, they are 4-10 and have lost Trout for about 40 or so games (joining 13 other Angels on the IL) and are unclear about Ohtani’s status as their ace. The Angels are in so much trouble that owner Arte Moreno’s promise not to trade Ohtani will undergo a 19-game stress test.
The Angels are a Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing with a blown engine. They are a Tuscan villa with backed up plumbing. They are Southern California on a rainy day. Baseball’s contribution to empty artistry.
Since 2018, when Ohtani essentially landed in the laps of the Angels as an international free agent when the NL did not have the DH, Los Angeles has had two of the four best players in baseball as ranked by WAR. (Ohtani and Trout, who follow Mookie Betts and Aaron Judge.)
And yet with Trout and Ohtani as teammates for these six years, the Angels:
- Are 50 games under .500 with the 11th worst record in baseball (373-423, worse than Oakland).
- Are one of only seven teams not to reach the playoffs.
- Have never had Trout and Ohtani play 120 games each in the same season.
Back when Trout debuted in 2011, Mick Jagger teamed with Joss Stone, Dave Stewart, Damian Marley and A.R. Rahman to form a musical supergroup known as SuperHeavy. They cut 29 songs in 10 days. A review by The Guardian noted “a sense of star-studded pointlessness” from SuperHeavy. The New York Times acknowledged free-wheeling creativity but also defined the album’s basic problem: “an almost total lack of good songs.”
“The assembled talents,” wrote The Independent, “cast around for a style of their own without ever unearthing the natural chemistry on which great bands rely.”
There was no second album from SuperHeavy. The 2018-23 Angels are the follow-up act, a supergroup in which the sum is less than the parts.
Trout turns 32 next month. He was just starting to heat up after pitchers have been blowing fastballs past him with impunity for two months. He sees 62.9% four-seamers and sinkers, the most of any hitter in baseball, followed by Myles Straw and Steven Kwan, the type of singles hitters who normally get such a “here-it-is-try-to-hit-it” treatment. Trout hit .236 against the baseball version of the Keto diet. Overall, his batting average, on-base percentage and slugging were the worst since his 40-game cameo as a 19-year-old.
Trout is still a very dangerous hitter, just not at the all-time heights he established through his 20s. More so than heaters above his hands, his biggest problem has been staying healthy. Say Trout misses the next 40 games, a reasonable number given the history of broken hamate bones. That means in the past seven years he will have missed 31% of the Angels’ games. He hasn’t played in more than 140 games since 2016.
By age 31, the wobbly-kneed Mickey Mantle, Trout’s best statistical comp, had played more than 140 games nine times. Trout has done so four times.
Ray Acevedo/USA TODAY Sports
Ohtani just finished the greatest month of baseball anybody has ever seen. Hyperbole? Not when you consider the volume and breadth of what he did in June.
He slugged .952 in the month, the sixth highest in any month by any player with at least 125 plate appearances. Only Babe Ruth (four times) and Joe DiMaggio ever slugged better in any month. And neither the Babe or Joe D. also made five stars on the mound with a 3.26 ERA and 11 strikeouts per nine innings the way Ohtani did. (The Babe’s best slugging months all came after he abandoned the pitching gig.)
To see Ohtani lose velocity, yield homers and walk off the mound with a trainer Tuesday because of the blister seemed as disillusioning as a broken horn on a unicorn. His start had been pushed back because of a cracked nail, the precursor to the blister. The All-Star break is an opportune time for Los Angeles to give Ohtani time to treat the finger and simply to rest from pitching. If he starts the sixth game out of the break, Ohtani will get a 15-day break from pitching.
His workload has been stupefying. Over the past two seasons, only two batters have hit more home runs (Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber) and only two pitchers have struck out more batters (Gerrit Cole and Spencer Strider). And he pitched and hit in the World Baseball Classic.
Yet, if the Angels are going to end the longest current playoff drought (eight years, tied with Detroit), they need Trout and two-way Ohtani at full capacity. That’s not going to happen at least through the trade deadline. The Angels are down to a 10.6% chance to make the playoffs, according to Baseball Reference, but even that’s too high with Trout out.
Oh, and to make the task even more difficult, starting Friday the Angels play 29 of 39 games against winning teams (Dodgers, Astros, Yankees, Blue Jays, Giants, Rangers, Rays and Reds). They are unlikely to have Trout in that season-defining stretch.
Still, the 4-10 slump and the injury to Trout have not changed the calculus for Moreno on Ohtani, who is a free agent after this season and will command at least $500 million offers from the Dodgers, Padres, Giants and Mets, if not more clubs. Moreno knows he may lose the player through a bidding war, but in the meantime, he regards Ohtani as a once-in-a-lifetime player he does not want to trade. He values not only the chance for a September run with Trout and Ohtani, but also the historic and entertainment value of having Ohtani, who is setting all-time records and winning a second MVP in an Angels uniform. Angels’ home attendance is up 8% this year.
Last year when teams began to offer Juan Soto-like trade packages for Ohtani, Moreno took him off the trade market. Moreno has no interest in trading the game’s most attractive asset for prospects, saying he would need another team’s best major league hitter and best major league pitcher for Ohtani.
Moreno’s position has not changed. He is not trading Ohtani as long as he believes his team remains even remotely in the playoff hunt. The Angels are four games out of a playoff spot. They have 19 games before the Aug. 1 trade deadline. Barring an epic collapse and change of heart, a trade remains highly unlikely.
In the meantime, with the dynamic duo down a superhero again, the Angels look all too familiar to how they have looked for these six years with Trout and Ohtani. They are Jagger singing in Sanskrit, as he did with SuperHeavy. They are the supergroup that has not worked, an assemblage of talents that has not unearthed the natural chemistry on which great teams rely.
