Mike Trout finally hit his 400th home run, but can Angels slugger get to 500? Why the math isn't in his favor

Injuries have dramatically cut down on Trout's playing time over the years

Longtime Angels superstar Mike Trout delivered his 400th career home run Saturday. It took a while, as he was stuck in 398 for more than a month, but he's finally there.

This milestone is a big one. Trout is just the 59th player in MLB history to ever reach 400 career home runs. A handful of Hall of Fame outfielders fell just short, such as Al Kaline (399), Harold Baines (384), Larry Walker (383) and Jim Rice (382). 

In terms of center fielders, Trout becomes the eighth to get to 400 homers after Willie Mays (660), Ken Griffey Jr. (630), Mickey Mantle (536), Andre Dawson (438), Carlos Beltrán (435), Andruw Jones (434) and Duke Snider (407). 

Again, it's a significant milestone for any player.

Mike Trout hits career home run No. 400: Angels slugger becomes just 59th MLB player to reach milestone

R.J. Anderson

And yet, thanks to the skyscraper-high bar Trout set for himself early in his career, we are trained to look for more. The 500-homer plateau has long been the big one when it comes to the elite tier of sluggers in baseball history. Remember sitting around the elementary school lunch table naming the entire 500 club? Right now, there are 28 members of the 500.

Can Trout get there? 

He got off to a hot start and felt like a good bet for a while. Through his age-27 season, Trout had already clubbed 285 home runs, averaging 35 a year from 2012-19. 

He has obviously slowed down here in recent years, mostly due to injury. Still, the biggest indicator of future injuries once a player gets up toward his mid-30s is past injuries. Trout only played in 36 games in 2021, 119 in 2022, 82 in 2023 and 29 last season. He has an IL stint this season too. 

When Trout does play, he's generally hit home runs in high volume, these last six weeks notwithstanding. He hit 40 in his 119 games in 2022. He hit 10 in his 29 games last year. Including the COVID-shortened 2020 season, Trout hasn't played a full season since 2019. Starting with 2020, though, Trout's 162-game average in home runs is 42. He's still crushing them. He's just not playing enough.

It's a good sign this season that Trout has a good chance to play his most games since 2019 at 124 with a week to go. The bad sign would be that his home run rate started to slow down, but that could always change. Sometimes they happen in waves. 

Trout is 34 years old and has five years left on his contract with the Angels. If he didn't hit a home run the rest of this season and retired immediately after his contract expires, he'd need to average exactly 20 home runs per season the rest of his deal to get to 500. 

The gut feeling is that he'll fall short, right?

Here's a breakdown of hypothetical home runs per season to get Trout exactly to 500, so we can see if it is reasonable or not. 

• Rest of 2025: 1
• 2026: 28
• 2027: 23
• 2028: 19
• 2029: 16
• 2030: 13

It seems like it might be a stretch after his recent drought. He only has 22 this season. I could see him going higher the next two seasons than I surmised above but then bottoming out a bit lower than listed in the last few season. Injuries could wreck things too, and it wouldn't even be surprising. They've been a big problem the last handful of seasons for Trout. 

For whatever it's worth, Bill James' favorite toy spits out just a 5% chance for Trout to reach 500 homers and projects him to finish with 454. I feel like his chances are better than that but it's possible I'm being optimistic here because I want Trout to get there. The recent injury history certainly casts a pall over the matter. The best bet is he falls short of 500, but there's a chance he finds a way there.

For now, we can enjoy Trout getting to 400 home runs and having his second-highest home run total in a season since 2019.