An article about two of the most beloved players in MLB history should be a happy occasion, but this one can be distilled down to two words.
This sucks.
This is simply the truth now that the comparison between Mike Trout and Ken Griffey Jr. has turned from a contentious, yet fun debate into an increasingly depressing reality. Like Griffey so often was after the end of the 1990s, Trout is now in a post-prime era where trips to the injured list feel more common than highlights.
The latest is a torn meniscus that figures to keep Trout out for a while. Probably not the whole season, mind you, but likely for months.
For anyone in the mood for something hard to watch, the Los Angeles Angels star’s appearance before the media on Tuesday should do the trick:
"We'll get through it" 😢 @EricaLWeston @Angels l #RepTheHalo pic.twitter.com/2pxLf8JJfn
— Bally Sports West (@BallySportWest) May 1, 2024
That’s not a three-time American League MVP right there. Or an 11-time All-Star. Or even a future Hall of Famer. It’s a human man who’s found the end of his rope.
It’s amazing how context can make bad things feel even worse. The 32-year-old Trout came into 2024 “getting chills” just thinking about playing like an MVP again. And he had been, slamming a league-leading 10 home runs through 29 games.
But now he’s out again, and it’s not even the only thing that brings that unwelcome tingle of familiarity to the surface.
Trout vs. Griffey Was Fun…Until It Wasn’t
I haven’t been around that long in the scheme of things, but apparently long enough to vouch that comparisons of Trout to Griffey have been there from the beginning.
I first played with the idea on July 6, 2012, when Trout was midway through his first full year with the Angels. It was hard not to, honestly. Distilled down to their essences, they were both powerful, speedy, easy-to-root-for center fielders who hit the MLB world like two meteors.
Did comparing Trout to Griffey then run the risk of being premature? Well, yeah. But all’s well that ends well. Trout ended 2012 with a rookie-record 10.5 rWAR and then spent the next decade keeping the comparison very much alive.
If anything, whether Trout or Griffey was better through the age of 30 amounts to a taste test. Griffey had the home runs and the Gold Gloves. Trout had the rate stats and the MVPs. There’s no wrong choice here. Just a whole lot of [waves hands] fun stuff.
Mike Trout vs. Ken Griffey Jr. through the age of 30 is a lot more fun to ponder than Mike Trout vs. Ken Griffey Jr. after the age of 31. pic.twitter.com/o4vxWT7lds
— Zachary D. Rymer (@zachrymer) May 2, 2024
Of course, baseball fans of a certain age have a certain strategy for dealing with what happened to Griffey after the age of 30. We just don’t go there.
Suffice it to say it wasn’t a fun time. Injuries limited Griffey to an average of 106 games between 2001 and 2009 with the Cincinnati Reds and Chicago White Sox. His return to the Seattle Mariners in 2010 was fun while it lasted, but it lasted only 33 games before he literally drove off into the sunset.
Ultimately, Griffey’s last 10 seasons yielded fewer wins above replacement (7.6) than he’d had in 1993, 1996 and 1997. He also got into the playoffs just once in that span, and it was for three games in 2008 for a White Sox squad nobody remembers.
Albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with what certain unserious people are saying, Trout’s career has already taken on a similar trajectory.
His durability first started getting shaky in the late 2010s and is now basically nonexistent. Calf, back and hamate injuries resulted in him missing more than half the Angels’ games between 2021 and 2023. Now it’s his left knee keeping him out, which is to say nothing of how his OPSes from ’23 and this year are his worst since his forgotten arrival in 2011.
As for his playoff resume, Trout will be lucky to so much as match Griffey’s late-career playoff exposure.
The Angels Won’t Be Good Again Any Time Soon
If a team’s success could be measured in MVP winners and dollars spent, then the Angels of the last decade would have to be on some kind of Mt. Rushmore.
Between Trout’s three and Shohei Ohtani’s two, the Angels collected half of the AL MVPs handed out between 2014 and 2023. They also had top-10 payrolls annually.
Yet for all that, they were almost smack in the middle (17th, to be exact) in wins and made only one playoff appearance. That was in 2014, and it lasted all of three games.
At 11-20, the Angels are on a track this year that will likely result in a ninth straight losing season and a 10th straight year without playoff baseball.
And it’s not just Trout whose age and mileage are consistently manifesting in injuries. Anthony Rendon is in the same boat. The two of them will eat up over $75 million in payroll space this year and again in 2025 and 2026.
The farm system, meanwhile, is kaput. Per B/R’s Joel Reuter, it’s the worst in MLB and it has zero top-100 prospects. Call it par for the course, as the Angels have recently been better known for rushing talent than for developing it.
The only conceivable avenues for Trout to achieve playoff success at this stage involves either new leadership in Anaheim or a trade out of there for the Millville, New Jersey native. And make no mistake: both are “fat chance” propositions.
Arte Moreno thought about selling the Angels, but ultimately reverted to his usual stubbornness and decided to stick around. And even if Trout himself were to reverse course on his own stubbornness vis-à-vis a trade escape hatch, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic summarized his apparent untradeability better than I ever could.
As such, it’s not too soon to reckon with what may never be for Trout as he plays out the final 6.5 years of his 12-year deal.
How Will We Remember Trout?
By the time Griffey was done playing, his career simultaneously felt like an experience that should have been better and a wildly fun time anyway.
For the regular season, he played in 1,286 wins against 1,383 losses. And while he did get into 18 playoff games, he ended his career with as many at-bats in the World Series as me, you and any other rando out there: zero.
That he nonetheless fell only three votes shy of unanimous induction into the Hall of Fame is telling. The 630 home runs surely helped Griffey’s cause, but I’d also say he was a vibes inductee.
To think of Griffey was to think of backwards hats, impossible catches, awe-inspiring homers and, above all, the mad dash home in Game 5 of the 1995 American League Division Series.
Indeed, Griffey’s entire run through the ’95 playoffs is a good case of absence of evidence not being absence of evidence. He hit five home runs in the ALDS alone, plus another in a Championship Series in which he also had a 1.011 OPS.
In other words, it was not because Griffey was incapable of producing one that he ended his career without an impressive playoff resume.
By all rights, the same should be true of Trout. A team with a lineup full of Trouts would hypothetically be the 13th-best team in history. And since 2012, no hitter has done as much to boost his team’s win probability as Trout has.
But when it comes down to his actual playoff resume, all we have are those three games from 2014 in which he homered (good!) but also went 1-for-12 (bad…). Barring a miracle of some kind, that may be what we’re still left holding when his career is over.
It’ll be some consolation that Trout will always have his own impossible catches and awe-inspiring home runs to tide over anyone who follows his name down a YouTube rabbit hole. It’s not overly flattering, however, that his top-viewed highlight is him whiffing against Ohtani to end last year’s World Baseball Classic.
Like Griffey, Trout is going to get into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. And he’ll deserve it. Heck, he already has more career WAR than Griffey.
But even more so than Griffey, what won’t be on Trout’s plaque will be just as notable as what’s there. It won’t be his fault, but it’ll be his story all the same.
And that sucks.
