Mike Trout: does the world’s best baseball player finally have a supporting cast?

Mike Trout has done so many wondrous things in nearly 11 full big-league seasons – 319 home runs, nine All-Star appearances, three American League Most Valuable Player awards among them – that it is hard to believe that he has but one career postseason hit. One.

That lonely hit, a bases-empty home run, came in the top of the first inning of a game on 5 October 2014 that the then-Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim would lose to the Kansas City Royals, 8-3, to get swept out of the American League Division Series in three games.

That 1-for-12 performance at the plate was in Trout’s only postseason, so he has zero playoff victories. Since 2015 – a period when the other Los Angeles team, the Dodgers, have been to three World Series, winning one – the Angels have not had a winning season.

It is hard to feel too sorry for a big-league ballplayer who has a 12-year, $426.5m contract. But it must hurt Trout, widely considered the best baseball player on the planet and possibly one of the greatest of all time, that his teammates have been unable to complement his talent for so long.

That is, perhaps, until now. He is playing for a Los Angeles Angels team (they dropped the of Anaheim part six years back) who have established themselves as a contender in the first six weeks of the season, winning 10 of their first 15 games in May to become a contender in the AL West, where their main challengers are the Houston Astros.

“I’m just really happy for the guys,” Joe Maddon, their third-year manager, said in a news conference after an 11-3 victory over Tampa Bay earlier this month. “They come ready to play every day. They’re very tightly knit. We’re a lot of fun.”

Wait. Joe Maddon. Remember him? Just six years ago, Maddon led the Chicago Cubs to