I, like others, am very sad about Trout. But I see a lot of people suggesting this means the season is guaranteed doomed and we shouldn’t still be trying to contend, which I understand given the past few years but I think is not the case. The emotional blow of losing him for a while is hard to evaluate, but the inherent randomness of baseball means that this temporary injury might HOPEFULLY (not trying to jinx us) have less impact than it feels like.

Assuming Trout’ll be out for 6 weeks (the midpoint of some projections I’ve seen) and that he would’ve continued to produce at his season average WAR pace (3.1 fWAR in 81 games so far), he’d miss 35 games and thus miss out on 1.34 WAR of production. Yes, he was starting to heat up, but that’s hard to quantify and rough to assume is consistent. Using his season averages, the team is on average expected to miss out on just a win and a half.

With Drury and Neto hopefully coming back after the All Star break, Rendon back already, and better depth than in past years (Renfroe, Moniak, Escobar, Moustakas), I really hope this isn’t going to turn into another “Shohei and the Salt Lake Bees” type season. It’s not impossible that it will, but I think there’s legitimate reason to remain hopeful that it won’t.

This team is 3 games back from the Wild Card. They were in a playoff slot a literal week ago. I believe they are currently closer to a playoff push than any Angels team since 2015. It’s been a terrible week for sure, but I think there’s still reason to hope that trades at the deadline can help patch up weaknesses and prepare for an August-September push.