Mike Trout made his 35th birthday count on Friday, Aug. 7. He homered for the Los Angeles Angels against Tyler Phillips and put them ahead 1-0 in the top of the first inning.
The blast was Trout’s sixth home run on his birthday, and it gave him something no player in MLB history had done before: a birthday homer in six different seasons. The list reaches back to 2012, then 2013, 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2026, a run that turns one date on the calendar into a recurring part of his career.
That is why the search around NLEX West standings has nothing to do with standings at all and everything to do with a milestone that landed on a single afternoon. Trout tied Alex Rodriguez and Mark Reynolds for the most birthday home runs in MLB history, a record that asks less about one swing than about how often he has managed to do the same thing when the calendar flips to Aug. 7.
The numbers around him this season make the feat look even less ordinary. Trout entered Friday with 83 hits, 18 home runs, 64 runs and 40 RBIs in 96 games, production that already had him moving through a full season at age 35. But the birthday homer added a different kind of weight, because the record is not built on one hot month or one lucky game. It is built on repetition across seasons, and Trout has now done it six times.
That leaves the obvious next question sitting where the record now stands: how far can he push it? The answer will not come from the birthday itself, but from the next time his schedule brings him back to Aug. 7, and whether the same swing that beat Phillips can keep adding to a mark that already belongs to him and two others.
