Angels Must Trade Trout: Top Five Trade Suitors

The Los Angeles Angels are an incredibly mediocre ball club with a bad farm system and only one superstar player. It’s time to trade Mike Trout.

In sports, teams with just one superstar never go anywhere. They become stuck in mediocrity and even though that one player puts rear-ends in seats and sells jerseys, the team itself does absolutely nothing.

Take the Chicago Bulls with Jimmy Butler or the Indiana Pacers with Paul George; two top-tier basketball players who are incredibly marketable. But they were the only high-ranking players in their respective locker rooms and for those teams to win a championship, both the Bulls and the Pacers realized they needed to turn their star players into future assets.

So they traded both of them for more players who will help lead the team to better success down the road.

In Major League Baseball, the Chicago White Sox realized they also needed to turn their star players into better, future assets. They traded Chris Sale for their current top two prospects in their system, Yoan Moncada and Michael Kopech. They traded Todd Frazier. And David Robertson. And Jose Quintana.

All to help solidify the farm system so that they can go for baseball’s top prize in the next five to seven years.

The Los Angeles Angels are a similar case to the White Sox, except they only have one attractive player to trade, and it’s the best player in baseball. He’s incredibly marketable, puts people in the stands, and is on MLB’s Instagram page at least once a night.

His name is Mike Trout and the Angels have to trade him.

It’s preposterous to think of trading the game’s best player away for a bunch of top prospects who may or may not pan out. But it’s what the Angels have to do within the next two years.

For one, the Angels have nobody around him. Trout is the only superstar with that ball club. Yes, there’s Andrelton Simmons, C.J. Cron and Albert Pujols. But those guys aren’t winning the Angels anything.

When building a team or building around a star, there are typically two options: Bring guys in through free agency or breed them in the farm system.

This is where the Angels are caught at a dead-end.

They could try attracting big-name free agents to Anaheim, but they already tried that. Remember how that one worked out? Josh Hamilton, Pujols, and C.J. Wilson? They got the biggest players money could buy at the time and Hamilton ended up falling back into his addictions while Wilson and Pujols watched their careers slip away from their grasp.

Yeah, not too impressive.

They also can’t build through their farm system. According to Bleacher Report’s post-draft farm system ranking, the Angels’ ranks 29th among all 30 teams. They don’t have much to work with down on the farm, which would make it difficult to develop these players to play around Trout.

Trout is the only player on the Angels who could yield a return great enough to rebuild the franchise. Teams that could afford Trout would give up anything for him because as stated earlier, he’s the game’s best player. He has everything any team could possibly want.

And if the Angels ever want to compete with the Houston Astros for the division title in the AL West, they’re going to need to trade Trout.

Here are the top five teams that would be best suited for a Trout trade.