Mike Trout is on the injured list again. Angels fans, somehow still here, said exactly what you would expect.
Trout landed on the 10-day IL Thursday with a right hamstring strain, the latest setback in a career that has been defined by injuries since 2021. The three-time MVP played in just 29 games before going down this time, and the Angels lost to the Athletics that night.
The reactions on social media were brutal but fair. Some version of this again was the dominant theme. Others pointed out that Trout has now played a full season exactly once since 2019. A few asked whether Trout’s career is effectively over as an everyday star.
That last question is the one Angels owner Arte Moreno does not want to hear, but it is impossible to avoid. Trout signed a 12-year, $426.5 million extension in 2019 that runs through 2030. He has been paid an average of $35 million a year to play in roughly half the games since.
This is not Trout’s fault. Injuries happen, and his are unusually awful. He has dealt with a calf strain, back issues, a meniscus tear, a hamate fracture, and now multiple hamstring problems. Each one has chipped away at the athletic prime that made him the best player of his generation.
The Angels are sitting at 31-43 and 12 games out of the AL West lead. They are bad, again, and the Trout era has produced exactly three playoff games. That is what has fans so frustrated.
The move to call up top prospect Christian Moore is the only silver lining. Moore was the No. 8 overall pick in the 2024 draft and has been mashing in the minors. He homered in his major league debut Thursday night, which gave Angels fans something to actually cheer about for the first time in weeks.
The bigger conversation now is what the Angels do at the trade deadline. They have valuable pieces like Tyler Anderson and Robert Stephenson who could bring back prospects from contenders. But the moves only matter if the front office accepts what this team is, which is years away from contending.
Trout, when healthy, can still be a 4-WAR player. The bat speed is still elite when he plays. The problem is that nobody knows what healthy looks like for him anymore. His timeline back from this hamstring strain is at least three weeks, and that is the optimistic version.
For context on his career arc, Trout has hit just .228 with a .787 OPS in his 29 games this season. The strikeout rate is up to 33 percent. The walk rate is down. The power is still there, but the contact issues that started creeping in during 2024 have only gotten worse.
If the Angels were serious about giving Trout a competitive environment for the back half of his career, they would have started rebuilding three years ago. Instead, they have kept trying to patch together rosters around him and Shohei Ohtani’s ghost, and they have nothing to show for it.
Angels fans deserve a plan. Mike Trout deserves a plan. So far, neither one has gotten anything close to one.
The 10-day IL stint will probably stretch longer. The Angels will probably lose more games. And Trout will probably come back, look fine for two weeks, and then end up back on the IL with something else. That is the cycle now. Nobody pretends otherwise.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
