Mike Trout’s mortality is showing

On Tuesday night, the best player in baseball showed up against the Milwaukee Brewers, hit a pair of ground ball singles, and then, in the third inning, vanished. Mike Trout had a right groin strain:

I felt it running to second base in the first inning. I wasn’t worried about it. Then I got in the dugout, I still felt it a little bit. I went in the outfield, started getting a little worse. Just didn’t want to push it. Obviously I wanted to go out there pretty bad, just go back out there, but it’s better to take time now than it is if you go out there and blow it out.

It’s not a serious injury, apparently. Trout will miss at least one game, but after that the Angels have an off day and he’s expected to be back in the lineup for Friday’s series against the Chicago Cubs. But with the 27-year-old poised for what could be a historic season (he’s hitting .406/.592/.938!), that groin strain is a reminder of the only thing that could possibly derail Trout’s march towards even-greaterness: his own body.

For some years now it’s been a hobby of mine to watch Trout’s numbers click upwards. They’ve done so with the frightening regularity of a Geiger counter. Click. 20 WAR. Click. 30. 40. 50. Trout’s climb up the all-time leaderboards has seen him overtake players — great ones! — while he was almost insultingly young. Since dismantling the American League as a 20-year-old, his rise towards baseball divinity has been more inexorable than thrilling.

Trout’s prime years were the looming backdrop to the early phase of his career. His pre-prime career was already more or less Hall-worthy, but it was unclear just how good he could get. At 27 we should be finding out. But now there’s a snag: Trout’s starting to get hurt.

The trouble began in 2017, when a thumb injury robbed Trout of almost 50 games after he’d missed 16 in the previous four seasons combined. Then in 2018, wrist inflammation took him out for the better part of August. When he has been healthy, Trout has been transcendent. His 2018 line, .312/.460/.628, is the stuff of legends. But the missed time is piling up — he has only played in about 80 percent of his team’s games over the past two seasons — signposting a potential future in which he ends up as ‘merely’ an inner-circle Hall of Famer rather than one of the top three or four players in baseball history.

Of course, Trout could shake off the injuries as easily as he has everything else in his career (does anyone remember his supposed weakness to the high fastball?), and roll into yet another terrific season. But since his debut in 2011, only this slew of little-ish hurts has seemed like a threat to a man whose game has no weaknesses that could be considered a long-term concern.

Mike Trout being day-to-day is not really a cause for panic, even for Angels fans. But what it is is a little reminder that not everything might go to plan. It’s absurd that Trout has made it as far as he has without any doubts about where he’ll end up, but now those doubts are starting to creep in, uninvited and unwelcome. At 27, Trout’s finally beginning to confront his own mortality.

Perhaps this will make him feel more relatable. Forces of nature are hard to sympathise with, after all, and Trout’s conquest of every challenge he has faced has been almost a little too easy. He probably would be a little more beloved around the league had he gone through a sophomore slump or had to overcome some serious flaw in his game.

At the same time, the gloss of divinity that has coated Trout’s career to date is so rare and powerful that it’s hard not to mourn the first signs of flaking.