Ohtani (left) is done for the season, an oblique injury added to his elbow’s now-reinforced UCL tear. He can walk in free agency, but Trout (right) may be entertaining trade thoughts a lot more deeply now . . .

George F. Will once wrote (in Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball) that A. Bartlett Giamatti was to baseball’s commissionership what Sandy Koufax was to the pitcher’s mound, having “the greatest ratio of excellence to longevity.” The Athletic‘s Marc Carig wrote last Satuday of Shohei Ohtani, “singular excellence is no match for collective mediocrity.”

Last Friday, Ohtani’s Angel Stadium locker was empty, and a large duffel containing his equipment and other belongings sat in front of it, after he was placed in the injured list at last—with an oblique strain. “No ceremonial sendoff,” Carig wrote. “No expressions of gratitude. Just a tender oblique and a good old-fashioned Gen Z ghosting. How appropriate. Now the credits roll on a baseball travesty.”

Ohtani has also undergone surgery on his pitching elbow at last. His surgeon, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the same surgeon who performed Ohtani’s prior Tommy John surgery—called the new procedure “reinforcement” of the torn ulnar collateral ligament, not full Tommy John surgery. It means Ohtani won’t pitch again until 2025, but he will suit up as a DH in 2024. For whom, only time and the off-season free agency market to be will tell.

“Thank you very much for everyone’s prayers and kind words,” Ohtani said on Instagram following the Tuesday procedure. “It was very unfortunate that I couldn’t finish out the year on the field, but I will be rooting on the boys until the end. I will work as hard as I can and do my best to come back on the diamond stronger than ever.”

Note that he didn’t say for whom he expects to come back after signing a new deal this winter.

A baseball travesty? The Angels had the two greatest players of their time together in their fatigues for six years, and they couldn’t support the two with a competent, competitive supporting cast who could pick it up when one or both was injured. It was as if the 1962-66 Dodgers had swapped in the ’62-’66 Mets for everyone except Hall of Famers Koufax and Don Drysdale.

Carig called it “sabotage.” You could think of far worse applications. “They did this through general mismanagement and their own brand of incompetence,” Carig continued. “Those sins endured despite their churn of managers and front-office regimes, only further reinforcing that the full credit for this failure falls at the feet of the constant throughout it all: the owner, Arte Moreno.”

It may be wasting breath and writing space to recycle that Moreno brought a marketer’s mentality to a baseball team, aiming once and forever at what George Steinbrenner used to call “name guys who put fannies in the seats,” without stopping first to ponder whether they’d equal a cohering team on the field and at the plate and whether his true baseball people had other such cohering parts in mind. And, whether it was always good for a player’s health.

Baseball people who did stop to ponder such things didn’t last long under Moreno’s command. Whether by way of the owner’s caprices or by way of their own mistakes turned into impossible-to-ignore disaster, Moreno’s Angels have been the Steinbrenner Yankees of the 1980s as you might have imagined them if The Boss hadn’t been so shamelessly public a nuisance.

Think about this: It took an oblique strain almost four weeks later for the Angels to do what should have been done when Ohtani’s ulnar collateral ligmanent tear took him off the mound but not out of the batter’s box. The adults in the room should have overruled Ohtani’s understandable desire to continue at least with his formidable bat, disabled him entirely, and placed his health at top priority.

You can only imagine the look when last Friday came with Ohtani’s packed duffel in front of his locker. Don’t be shocked at it. If he can’t play the rest of the season, he can come to the park in moral support without having to unpack it or bring it from home.

Someone had to find the adults in the Angel room in the first place. Apparently, there were none to be found. Whether draining the farm at the trade deadline for one more run at it that proved impossible, whether turning right around and waiving most of what they drained the farm for, whether managing the health of their two supermarquee presences, the Angels room remains bereft of adults.

Oft-injured third baseman Anthony Rendon, who’s had little but injury trouble since signing big with the Angels as a free agent, developed a habit of discussing his injuries with a wary sarcasm, until he finally cut the crap and said the shin injury incurred on the Fourth of July wasn’t the mere bone bruise the Angels said it was but, rather, a full-on tibia fracture—and that he only learned it was a fracture in mid-August.

Now, Rendon was asked whether he was actually considering retirement from the game. “I’ve been contemplating it for the last ten years,” he said. If he actually does it, it would give the Angels something other teams would love but might raise fresh alarms in Anaheim: financial flexibility. Just what they need, more room for fannies-in-the-seats guys assembled with no more rhyme, reason, or reality.

Mike Trout, the player of the decade of the 2010s and still formidable when healthy, has been injury riddled the past few seasons. He may not be jeopardising his Hall of Fame resume, but something is badly amiss when he feels compelled to return perhaps a little sooner than he should return, then ends up back in injury drydock yet again after one game.

Once upon a time it was impossible to think of Trout anywhere but Anaheim. But trade speculation and fantasies around him have sprung up now more than in the recent past. Trout himself has dropped hints that he’s exhausted of the team doing either too little or not enough (take your pick) to build a genuinely, sustainingly competitive team around himself and Ohtani.

That’s not what he signed up for when he signed that blockbuster ten-year, $370 million plus extension a year ahead of what would have been his first free agency. That’s not what he signed up for when he showed the world he wasn’t that anxious then to leave the team on which he fashioned and burnished a jaw-dropping Hall of Fame case.

It was Trout, too, who welcomed Ohtani to the Angels with open arms and personal charm, then had to find too many ways to grin and bear it as the pair—when healthy—performed transcendence while surrounded by unimportance. If Trout now questions the Angels’ commitment to competitiveness and their regard for the health of those in their fatigues, pondering himself as well as Ohtani, only fools would blame him.

Most major league teams would kill to have even one such king of kings on their roster. Two of this year’s affirmed division winners (the Braves, the Dodgers) have at least one each. (Ronald Acuna, Jr., Braves; Mookie Betts, Dodgers.) The Angels had the two most singular such kings of kings and blew it higher and wider than the Hiroshima mushroom cloud.

“What remains stunning in all of this,” Carig wrote, “is the level of waste. The Angels have succeeded like nobody else in doing so little with so much.”

Sound organizations create a plan and then follow it. These Angels, not so much. A throughline can be drawn from Albert Pujols to Anthony Rendon, with Ohtani and Trout’s extension in between. What’s clear is that all of these big-ticket transactions weren’t part of some grand plan. Rather, they were the product of a billionaire collecting baubles, just faces to slap on a billboard.

Ohtani’s free agency is still liable to become a bidding war of stakes once thought unfathomable. With or without his recovery time limiting him to a DH role, Ohtani’s going to have suitors unwilling to surrender until he does. Which one will convince him they know what they’re doing to fashion truly competitive teams around him? We’ll know soon enough.

But considering that baseball medicine can still be tried by jury for malpractise, whomever plans to out-romance the Angels for Ohtani and seduce them into a deal for Trout had better come with adults in the room to manage them and their health prudently. There’s no point telling the billionaire with his baubles and billboards to grow up otherwise.