Get in, Loser. It’s Mike Trout Comeback Season.
- Sheehan Planas-Arteaga
- Apr 18
- 4 min read
The Mike Trout comeback is in full swing after his Bronx beatdown.
It is November of 2019. Mike Trout, fresh off a season in which he hit 45 home runs and led the league in OBP, SLG, OPS, and OPS+, has just captured his third American League MVP award. Despite Trout’s superior efforts on the field, his Los Angeles Angels finished 72-90 and miles out of playoff contention a little over a month prior. In a basement somewhere, a grossly out-of-shape man in his late 40s, who got cut from his high school baseball team because of “politics,” fires up his Twitter account. He’s got something he wants, no, needs to say about the Angels centerfielder. After a series of drafts and edits, he comes up with, “Mike Trout is not a winner. He can have his MVP, that’s probably all he cares about anyway. Give me winning ballplayers on my team any day of the week and twice on Sunday.”
This was the world we’ve abandoned over the last few years. A world where Mike Trout Fatigue dominated the minds of some baseball fans who simply could not come to grips with the fact that the best player of this generation plays for a bad team that rarely wins anything, and that baseball is not a sport that allows for one player to lift a team on his shoulders for 162 games.
Trout’s last Trout-like season was 2022, when he put up 6.1 bWAR in just 119 games, bashing 40 homers in the process. Since then, he has played just 241 of 486 games due to a slew of injuries. He’s hit .242/.358/.470 in that span; nothing to sneeze at for a mere mortal, but nowhere near the standard of Mike Trout. He turns 35 in August, leading many to wonder if they’d ever see the Millville Meteor in all his glory again. The basement trolls could finally rest their poor sausage fingers. No need to kick a man when he’s down.
Then the 2026 MLB season began, and Mike Trout became…Mike Trout again.
“More in the Tank”
The telltale sign across all sports of an athlete’s decline is the diminishment of his tools. No one can stay running as fast and jumping as high as they did in their early 20s. Baseball tracks everything nowadays, so we have data that shows objective signs of aging. You would think Mike Trout would have slowed down after all the injuries he’s sustained over the years, including soft tissue injuries.
Welp. He hasn’t.
We should have known the real Trout would make a comeback during Spring Training, when he essentially called his shot with his legs. Running at 30 ft/sec is a benchmark in baseball. The 30 mark is reserved for the elite of the elite when it comes to legs. Mike Trout, despite weighing in between 230 and 240 pounds, used to regularly crank it up to those speeds in his earlier days. Although he’s still been very fast, he hasn’t hit 30 in years. “I feel great,” he told reporters before a Spring Training. “I’m going to get to 30, because I got more in the tank.”
The following week he did indeed hit 30 ft/sec while running to first on a groundball to the shortstop. The speed is there, which was a positive omen heading into Opening Day. He has not disappointed since then.
Yankee Stadium Takeover
Mike Trout just had the best series by a visiting player in the history of the New York Yankees. In the four-game series in the Bronx, which the Halos split with the Yankees, Trout hit .375 with five home runs, scoring eight runs and driving in nine. New York pitchers had just about enough of number-27 by the final game, walking him three times, one of them intentionally (he still managed to homer on one of the few pitches he got to hit). Yankee Stadium became Mike Trout’s driving range this past week.
Early, but Encouraging
We’re less than a month into the 2026 season, but Mike Trout looks to be all the way back, assuming injuries don’t once again derail him and the Angels. He’s leading the league in walks and runs, has an OPS of 1.010, has hit seven home runs and has even chipped in a couple steals (he’s in the 90th percentile of average sprint speed so far). He’s also accumulated 1.4 bWAR in 19 games, after he put up 1.5 in 130 games last season. This man was once compared to Mickey Mantle, and through his age-27 season, you could argue he was better than Mantle. You could argue he was better than anyone at that point in his career. But injuries happen, and Father Time is undefeated, as they say.
Father Time might have to wait a little longer on Mike Trout, however. I can hear the basement trolls cracking their knuckles, ready to pound on those keyboards once again.
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