Mike Trout’s absence immediately felt during anemic performance against Phillies

It doesn't exactly take a rocket surgeon (that's a job, right?) to come to the conclusion that the Los Angeles Angels were going to feel the loss of Mike Trout. LA was already struggling to perform on a consistent basis with Trout clubbing homers left and right, so not having him for weeks as he recovers from torn meniscus surgery was a mortal lock to make them tangibly worse.

However, it would have been nice to get a short reprieve from the suffering, but it was not to be. In Wednesday's loss to the Phillies, Trout's absence from the top of the lineup proved to be extremely costly as the Angels we so very close to breaking through, but couldn't quite break through.

Angels' offense squanders multiple scoring chances against Phillies with Trout out

We'll never really know if having Trout in the lineup would have saved the Angels as Zack Wheeler is tough against everyone, but it is hard not to wonder given that LA managed to get 10 hits but only scrounge up a single run across nine innings. Nolan Schanuel, Taylor Ward, Luis Rengifo, and Zach Neto all had multi-hit games, and if Trout was in the lineup and those hits had been sequenced differently as a result of a different lineup order, the Angels probably win.

Instead, the lone run for the Angels came via a solo homer off the bat of Ehire Adrianza which is the baseball equivalent of seeing a unicorn eating a patch of four-leaf clovers while standing next to a healthy Anthony Rendon.

There were other causes as well, to be fair. Wheeler is one of the better pitchers in baseball and while he wasn't at his best, the guy knows how to finish hitters when it counts. This was particularly apparent with Jo Adell, who went 0-5 with four strikeouts while hitting in the two-spot, which killed multiple prime opportunities over the course of the game.

The silver lining here is that there were multiple Angels hitters that did do some good work in Wednesday's game, and the bullpen did surprisingly well. The hope is that they will carry that momentum forward for the rest of the season.

However, there is no replacing Mike Trout. There is a real chance we will see a lot of games while he is out where LA will be very close to breaking through, but will still come up short.

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