Shohei Ohtani is gone but Mike Trout is still getting Tungsten Arm O’Doyled by Angels

The Baltimore Orioles made one of, if not the biggest trade of the offseason, acquiring Corbin Burnes in a deal with the Brewers. Burnes, unsurprisingly, got the ball on Opening Day against his hometown team, the Los Angeles Angels.

The Angels are a team most of the general public is down on because Shohei Ohtani departed. The team was bad with Ohtani, failing to make the playoffs a single time in his tenure there, and looks much worse on paper now.

The Angels do still have Mike Trout, and he made his presence known very quickly on Opening Day, quieting the crowd in Baltimore by hitting this home run in his first at-bat of the season off of Burnes.

Trout gave the Angels a quick 1-0 lead before the Orioles came to bat, but Baltimore came right back against Angels starter Patrick Sandoval, loading the bases with nobody out and scoring a pair of first inning runs on a Anthony Santander force-out and an RBI single by Jordan Westburg. They followed that up with three more in the second inning on a two-run single by Adley Rutschman and a sacrifice fly by Santander. This is vaguely familiar to Shohei Ohtani's time with the Angels.

Shohei Ohtani might be gone, but the Tungsten Arm O’Doyle tweets will live on thanks to Mike Trout

For those unfamiliar, Tungsten Arm O'Doyle is a fictional player who played for the fictional Akron Groomsmen in the 1920's. He was made up by a Twitter user back in 2021 in a tweet that went insanely viral.

The purpose of it is to highlight Ohtani and Mike Trout doing historic things while the Angels find a way to lose. The tweets picked up steam in the 2022 and 2023 seasons, when Ohtani was doing MVP-type things and Trout was injured most of the time.

Now, Ohtani is gone, but Trout is still with the Angels and healthy. He hit a home run to give the Angels some momentum to begin their season, and it was immediately thrown away with five unanswered runs (so far).

If healthy, there's every reason to believe Trout will be an elite player. Unfortunately, he's surrounded by very little talent, and there's a good chance that the Angels will lose a whole lot of games. Assuming Trout does Trout things and the Angels do Angels things, we might see the name Tungsten Arm O'Doyle pop up on Twitter fairly often.