ANAHEIM — No one raised an eyebrow at Mike Trout during the Angels’ 6-5 win over the Phillies on Monday night. There was no reason to. Trout went to the plate all four times the leadoff spot came up for Los Angeles. Manned center field all nine innings. Stole a bag. Scored from second on a wild pitch. The biggest abnormality for the future Hall of Famer was the zero in the hit column.
That was Monday. Tuesday brought news that stunned everyone, his own manager included.
“It’s like you just leaving here after we finish talking,” a somber yet characteristically poised Ron Washington said to a group of reporters in Angel Stadium’s home dugout, “and stumble down the steps and break something. To me it’s the same. It was a shock.”
So this is where the Angels are: Monday night’s thrilling win notwithstanding, the team is 11-18, and now their best player — the MLB home run co-leader — will miss considerable time after surgery to repair a torn meniscus. It’s not expected to end his season, but there’s no timetable yet for a return.
The 32-year-old had appeared in all 29 games of the season. Now, he’ll miss the next many, and the Phillies will witness the Angels’ first two Trout-less games of the season as they wrap up their west coast road trip.
“It’s too bad. I never want to see anybody get hurt, especially a great player like him,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said pregame Tuesday. “He was running around out here like there was nothing wrong last night … So I don’t know what happened.”
The injury bug has become all too familiar a pest for Trout in the current decade. From 2021 through 2023, a stretch that began after he joined an exclusive fraternity with his third MVP Award, Trout played in 237 of the Angels’ 486 games.
Just over half of those came in a 119-game season two years ago, and even then, he missed some time with back inflammation. A calf strain and a broken hamate bone cost him most of his 2021 and 2023 seasons, respectively. The torn meniscus will have the same effect in 2024.
There is a Phillies-related ripple effect here, beyond the obvious next two games. Mickey Moniak, Philadelphia’s No. 1 overall pick in 2016 who was traded to Anaheim in the 2022 Noah Syndergaard trade, will be a major part of the Angels’ center-field plan in Trout’s absence.
Washington wouldn’t go so far as to call Moniak the everyday center fielder, but he did say Moniak will get “extended playing time.” Moniak has hit .251 with a .728 OPS since his trade.
But Washington made clear what went without saying.
“We’ll never replace Mike,” he said. “Never. But whoever will go out there and we have to put in that lineup, I just want them to be who they are and do what they can do.”
Washington was a coach on the 2021 Atlanta Braves team that lost Ronald Acuña Jr. to a torn ACL in July yet went on to win the World Series anyway. The road ahead will be tougher for the Angels.
“We had backup personnel. Tremendous backup personnel,” Washington said of that Braves team. “Just like they lost [Spencer] Strider [this season]; haven’t missed a beat. They know how to win, and what we’re trying to do is learn how to win … Someone’s gotta pick it up. We’re gonna show up there every day and go play. Hopefully someone will pick it up.”
The Angels could, hypothetically, do what the 2022 Phillies did without Bryce Harper and play .600 ball until Trout returns. But it won’t lessen the sting of seeing a generational player, an inner-circle Hall of Famer who was just starting to look like his old, healthy self at the start of the season, fall victim to another long-term setback — completely out of nowhere.
“Just being a friend of his and a fan of his — it stinks, you know, just seeing a guy like that go down,” former teammate Brandon Marsh said. “You always want to see good guys have success. So just being a big fan of the game and just a fan of him — yeah, you know, it stinks.”
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