Mike Trout got on base four times against the Diamondbacks on Monday night, thanks to two walks and two singles. Trout is basically always on base—he’s currently sporting a career-high .464 OBP—so that’s not a remarkable thing in and of itself. Neither is the fact that his teammates failed to drive him a single time. The Angels lost the game 7-4, and have now lost seven of their last eight games. This is because Mike Trout is in hell.
Baseball is not basketball, in which a single transcendent player can will a team to 50 wins and a playoff appearance. No baseball player is good enough to carry 24 other scrubs all by himself, but if you had to imagine one who was, if you had to get really crazy and conjure the perfect baseball player capable of going out there and pulling a LeBron James every night, what would he look like? Probably something like this!
Mike Trout has been on pace for the best season of his already ridiculous career since May, but lately he has ascended to another plane of existence. There are galaxies swirling in dimensions that lay beyond the reach of human comprehension. Mike Trout has been to those places, and he went 3-for-3 with two walks while he was there.
In the month of June, Trout is hitting .439/.535/.772. He currently leads the league in the following categories: home runs (23), runs (60), walks (62), on-base percentage (.464), OPS (1.152) OPS+ (217), and total bases (176). The best way to talk about Mike Trout’s season is to just be as blunt as possible: nobody in the history of baseball has ever played baseball this well.
And the Angels keep losing! This team, this collection of absolute clowns, is somehow treading water with a 38-35 record and is in third place in the A.L. West. Baseball Prospectus puts their current chances at making the playoffs at 9.7 percent.
Imagine how depressing the end of the season is going to be. Mike Trout will be out there, putting the finishing touches on the greatest individual baseball season in the history of mankind, and when he’s all done, when he’s officially become a legend in the flesh, he’ll be sent home, because the crap-ass Angels will have won 79 games and missed the playoffs. I’m not even really joking when I say that this is an affront to humanity, and that it shouldn’t be allowed to happen. The commissioner should remove Mike Trout from Los Angeles as soon as possible, and he should be allowed to take Shohei Ohtani with him.