Mike Trout Just Got Old

 




The Los Angeles Angels are snake-bit.

They are cursed. Somehow someway someone put a hex on them. Sure they won a world series once, but that was 20 years ago. It must’ve been because Disney got involved with them at the time. It was fantasyland for Angels fans.

Maybe it was the baseball gods punishing the San Francisco Giants and Barry Bonds for crimes against baseball humanity. Bonds cheated to break the most hallowed records in the game. The Angels beating Bonds and the Giants was just a happy circumstance.

But, I digress.

Throughout the Angels history, they have had one misfortune after another plague them like the plague. Players have died. The team more than once snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They’ve had bus crashes and car accidents. I don’t know if it’s been more or less than other teams, but the Angels sure have had a lot.

The latest is with the greatest player they have ever produced. The great Mike Trout was available for the club to draft because of a technicality. They stumbled into him.

Angels owner Arte Moreno got fleeced in a trade and the player they traded for left for greener pastures. Because of that, the Angels got a compensatory pick. The league put those in when teams do something dumb to help the competitive balance.

The Angels scout that discovered Trout told the Angels to draft him. It was the most fortuitous action the club ever had. Did the Angels team management reward the scout for his once in a lifetime find? Nope. They fired him in a cost-cutting move.

Trout became the best player in baseball. He was a reward for Angels fans. For decades they prayed for a player to be developed by the team that they could be proud of. Someone that they could say they watched from the beginning. A player that they could tell their grandchildren about. Fans of other teams have had that fortune. Now it was finally Angels fans’ turn.

The Angels would have a player they could build around. They could surround Trout with key acquisitions and we fans could watch them compete on their way to the promised land. They even somehow got lucky and were chosen by the incredible Shohei Ohtani. Now, they would surely focus on going all out to build a winner. Right? 

That didn’t happen.

The owner went cheap. Arte Moreno signed a couple over the hill star players to rich contracts to put butts in the seats. Then he cut costs in player development departments that let the team die on the vine like a vineyard owner turning off the water.

Mike Trout’s Hall of Fame bound career has been squandered. It’s like some dunderhead inheriting a fortune and blowing it all on cars and booze. The Angels were given a gift, and they stood by and watched it atrophy.

The great Mike Trout is indeed human. The last couple of seasons he has had some nagging injuries that athletes get as they progress in age and in their careers. A calf injury cut last season short. That happens and is common. Therapy and rest can remedy it.

But now the death knell has been sounded.

Trout has a lower back injury that is so rare that his doctors only see it in a miniscule amount of people that get hit violently and repeatedly from side to side. His primary doctor is the leading spinal authority in medicine. They have never seen it in a baseball player. Trout and his doctors are in uncharted territory.

He’s got 7 1/2 years and $426.5 million dollars left on his contract. The Angels had 11 years to build a winner with Trout and have blown it.

That’s the worst insult of all.


Erik Drost, CC via Wikimedia Commons

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