You can make the argument that Mike Trout has a career that is knocking on the door of Hall-of-Fame worthy at age 30, but there is still a lot of baseball to be played. Nine All-Star appearances, three MVP awards, eight Silver Slugger awards, 323 home runs and a career average of .304 would leave any other player in baseball salivating.
That average may not be above .300 for long at this rate.
Trout is mired in an 1-for-28 slump that has seen the Angels drop 12 consecutive games, sitting under .500 at 27-29. During that time, the Houston Astros have seen their lead in the AL West climb to 8.5 games, which is tied with the New York Mets for the largest divisional lead in the MLB.
Reigning AL MVP Shohei Ohtani ranks 11th in all of baseball with 69 strikeouts, but all those whiffs do not mean a damn thing when you cannot win a ballgame. During the losing streak, the Angels have given up at least four runs all but once, which was a 2-1 loss to the New York Yankees last Thursday.
Jameson Taillon carried a perfect game into the eight inning for the Yankees that night.
You might think that the Angels have a chance of winning a game with the Boston Red Sox heading west for a series that started Monday, until you realize the Sox had won four straight and are a better road team (14-13) than home team (13-14) so far in 2022.
Then Michael Wacha threw his first shutout in five years in a 1-0 Boston victory. The 12-game skid is currently the longest in baseball this year.
The Angels also now have to contend with the Texas Rangers sitting only a game behind them in the AL West, with lowly Seattle sitting just 1.5 games back of Texas. This is actually a positive and negative for the Angels. The positive is that they can get back ahead of the teams coming up behind them, along with putting some distance in the process. The bad news is that the AL West is such a polarizing division that no one but the Astros and Angels should be above .500 by the time the season ends anyway.
Trout saw his batting average start the slump at .320. Currently, that average has plummeted to .276. The only times Trout reached base were three walks and a single in the bottom of the first Monday night.
We see the Angels, Chicago White Sox and Philadelphia Phillies already sitting below .500 through the first two months of the regular season. Philadelphia already fired Joe Girardi as Manager on Friday, after losing five-straight series. Chicago has the potential to right the ship in the AL Central, but Los Angeles and Philadelphia may be playing for a Wild Card at best, just a week into June.
If things could not be going worse for Los Angeles, now the team also introduced their Nike City Connect jerseys over the weekend, as another in a long line of Nike slowly ruining the uniform game of whatever league they have rights to. We have all seen how the NBA is more of a fashion show than entertainment, with teams having 5-6 uniforms per season. The Colorado Rockies introduced a green uniform as part of the 2022 Nike program, adding to the joke of “Mile High” when coming up with the concept.
Lest we all forget that the Angels still play in ANAHEIM, not Los Angeles…another notch in the belt of a team trying to find their identity both on and off the diamond.
The surf may be up as evidence of the new alternate uniform, but the tide is quickly washing out for 2022.
-JC24