Trout Seems Destined to Follow Griffey Jr. Career Slide

If you are a 10-year old baseball fan in southern California, you may have gotten this far without ever having a chance to see the player of this generation play. Even though he resides in your sunlit backyard. That’s because Mike Trout, once seemingly Joe DiMaggio, Ken Griffey Jr. and Mickey Mantle rolled into a muscled mass of ballplayer, to borrow a famous literary phrase: “has a cold.”

But while Trout has three Most Valuable Player Award trophies, a Rookie of the Year award, and eight silver bats, he hasn’t been THAT MIKE TROUT since 2019. If you’re a cheeky kid in Anaheim or LA, that’s long enough ago to be forgettable. Unknowable, even.

Trout is on the injured list (again), not quite seven weeks into the 2025 season. The Greatest Angel Ever is once again grounded, his wings clipped. Or maybe more apt: Trout’s knee is gimpy. The team is cautious, and optimistic that their star outfielder will be back on the field in roughly 10 days. But, forgive the rest of us if we cry foul.

Since 2019, when Trout won his third MVP, he’s been in a lineup only 348 of his team’s 677 games. That’s 51 percent. Which is an acceptable rate when you’re tallying presidential votes, but not when you’re being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to catch and slug a baseball for a living. The last six years of Trout’s career could best be characterized as DNP-BP, for “Did Not Play – Body’s Decision.”

At 33, Trout’s chronic injuries have effectively claimed the final phase of his career. Like others, most notably Griffey Jr., Mike appears doomed to limp his way to Cooperstown.

The Griffey Slide

Being compared to Ken Griffey Jr. will generally always be a nice thing. Junior is one of the most popular, beloved, and iconic players in the history of the sport. He was the perfect storm: a great, once-in-a-generation talent plus a superstar that commanded the camera and attention for his ebullient manner.

But, after he turned 30, Junior was (on paper at least) just another good slugging outfielder. He averaged 99 games, 19 homers, .260, and 57 RBI the last TEN YEARS of his career. Those are Junior numbers alright: SANDY ALOMAR JUNIOR.

Trout is on that same slide, and it appears he can’t get off the slippery slope. At the age of 27, Mike had 72 WAR. Since, in five plus seasons, he’s added about 2.5 WAR per year. The table below compares the performance of Griffey and Trout based on age/season.

Wins Above Replacement by Age: Junior and Trout

*Through games of May 6, 2025

Trout will join Griffey Jr. in Cooperstown one day. But, it now seems likely that once he does it will be accompanied by a slew of “what if?” questioning. What if Trout hadn’t gotten injured in 2022, when he smacked 40 homers in only 119 games? Or what if the pandemic hadn’t curtailed the 2020 season? That year, the Millville Meteor was on pace for more than 50 home runs, and could have won his fourth MVP. A few years earlier, in 2017, a 25-year old Trout missed all of June and most of July, which kept his numbers to 33 HR, 72 RBI, and 22 SB. He may have challenged 400 total bases that year if he could have avoided the IL.

Injuries are part of the game, but when it comes to Trout, they haunt him like Tiger Woods, another iconic athlete who has limped his way into the twilight. As the lynchpin of the Los Angeles Angels, Trout’s legacy now is in doubt. While it’s undeniable that he will be go down as one of the 10 greatest center fielders in history, like Griffey, it’s now coming with a “yeah, but” suffix. The Angels failure to win a playoff series in the Trout era could also hang around his collar.

Yet, in retrospect, following the ingenious five-year waiting period and subsequent years since Junior was honored at the Hall of Fame, Griffey’s failure to reach a World Series barely garners a mention. In fact, while some (many in Cincinnati, for example) are still frustrated by Griffey’s injury-plagued later years, that pain too has faded. What mostly remains are the gaudy, bold numbers on the back of the baseball card. The honors, the exciting plays, the remarkable talent that flashed so brightly, even if it didn’t last as long as we, or the ballplayer himself, had hoped.

Trout at 33 is still capable of harnessing his baseball talents and having a great season somewhere down the road, as noted in analysis by Jay Jaffe. Most likely it will happen as a designated hitter. Most likely it will be as a one-dimensional player. Should that happen: even a lesser Mike Trout is worth watching and rooting for.

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