By the time there was ten days remaining in spring training, Mike Morin thought he’d make it out of Arizona in the Angels bullpen, but he didn’t know it, not for certain. He was coming off a year in which he, Mike Scioscia and Billy Eppler understood that his peripheral numbers belied his 6.37 earned run average, as he struck out more than 27% of the batters he faced and the exit velocity against him was actually lower than that against Max Scherzer.
He’d come in from one of those lazy, blazing hot days he wasn’t scheduled to pitch and took his place in front of his locker in the back wall of the clubhouse. When over came Mike Trout.
“Want to play golf this afternoon?” asked Trout. Morin did, but had to explain that his golf clubs were back at his spring training and by the time he ate, showered, went back home for his clubs and got to the club it would delay Trout.
Trout had a solution. He told Morin to go take his shower, skip the clubhouse food, go get his clubs and he’d go pick up whatever Morin wanted for lunch. “Just give me your order, I’ll meet you (at the club), you can eat and we’ll play. Just give me your order. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“That’s all anyone needs to know about Mike Trout,” said Morin. “He’s the best player in the game, MVP, all the rest. I’m…well…I’m trying to make the team. And he’s taking my order and picking up my food so we can play together. He has no air of being a star. He’s just the most normal person you could ever meet.”
It is precisely who Mike Trout is, and always has been. He grew up in New Jersey a huge Yankee fan; in fact, when he was a senior in high school, the Yankee scouts were coming to do an in-home interview months before the draft, and his mother got a couple of Yankee cakes from a local bakery whose owner was also a huge Yankee fan.
But the previous summer, when the Yankees had a prospect team going to a tournament in Florida, while he wanted to go play for that team called the Yankees, he’d made a promise to a Tri-state travel team for whom he played, and, as one Yankee scout remembers, “loyalty always came first.”
This spring, asked about what is the most important thing he wants to be known as—being first or second for MVP all four years, leading in WAR all four years, starring in Subway commercials?—he goes back to his times to first base. “I’d like people to say, ‘he plays as hard as he can every time he steps on the field.”
Two years ago, Trout was in a discussion about how Derek Jeter, whom he respected to the nth degree, always busted it to first base. He was told of an advance scout for the Blue Jays in the late ‘80’s who had 90-something Robin Yount games in a six year period, in which the fastest he ever got Yount to first was 3.9 seconds, the slowest 4.0.
Trout did not know his own times, but took the person to Angels coach Dino Abel, who kept every player’s times down the line. The next day, Abel reported that going through all his files, he had some 3.7-3.8 times to first when Trout was lunging forward and getting a running start. Otherwise, the fastest was 3.9, the slowest, 4.0, over two seasons of data. All 240 pounds.
“If that’s how I’m remembered, that’s who I want people to think I am,” said Trout. He’s got power, riches, honor and fame.
He prefers 3.9/4.0. “That,” says Morin, “defines Mike Trout.” That and he’s a teammate takeout service.
Trout won’t be 25 until August 7, and may well turn out to be one of the best players of the last half-century, especially if the Angels can and will fit more talent around him so that too many of those historic seasons do not go without the reward or long runs into October. As great as he is. Trout has never played in a post-season game the Angels have won.
And he is not alone, which is why the generational longing for the past this spring is exactly as Bryce Harper described it—“Tired.” I have covered MLB for more than 45 years and the cycle of “there players today…” is like a reel. Older brothers are college seniors and don’t like what their high school junior brothers do to past their time. Sometimes it’s hair, sometimes it’s uniform styling, sometimes it’s what comes with the sport becoming multi-cultural. Owners want the talents of the players and the dollars of the international marketing, but emotion, batflips, et al are not the way things were done with the ’64 Yankees, even if it is the way a lot of us veterans—as they refer to Mike Barnicle on Morning Joe—played ball when we were 10 years old. It can be dress, even if Joe Maddon is dead on when he asks, “what’s the difference between a collared shirt and a non-collared shirt when a guy’s sleeping on a charter flight?”
No doubt it’s also the money, even though owner revenues have almost doubled the growth rate of player salaries since Judge Sotomayor ended the Great Strike in 1995.
Players like Trout and Bryce Harper are subject to more scrutiny than any of the Dynasty Yankees, on MLB Network, on MLB.com, on twitter. Harper was the next Mantle at age 16, on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and while he has been a legitimate star, the best player in the National League and a guy who knows and appreciates baseball history while playing the game with the reckless abandon as a Darren Erstad. Is he brash? That’s how he comes across. So, Reggie Jackson was brash. In many ways, so was Frank Robinson.
They didn’t have Bill Maher spewing obscenities about them, or twitter trending on seven words from a 30 minute conversation.
There’s the highlights Bryce Harper, the private Bryce Harper, and the guy who feels it’s tired to be pining for the 1950’s, when two original American League franchises had yet to integrate, a 23-year old who wants to celebrate the diverse baseball cultures—not just the homelands, but the different cultures that going into their ways of playing the sport as we see in the W.B.C.
Every player who went on this winter’s trip to Cuba has some story about Clayton Kershaw, and the missionary in him. When Andrew McCutchen felt the kids in Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West program—one of the most amazing inner city efforts in the country—had been unjustly punished, he sat down and wrote an essay about the tribulations of poor kids trying to play baseball in a sport whose teenage development is widely controlled by the huge profits made in the showcase/travel team business. Curtis Granderson devotes his life to inner city youth. Mookie Betts is an eloquent, thoughtful spokesman. Just listen sometime to Giancarlo Stanton wax about the respect he harbors for Ichiro Suzuki, especially the way Ichiro is ever-prepared for any role, anytime, anywhere, anyhow. And on and on.
Mike Trout goes down the line to first base the way Jackie Robinson and Pete Rose, Robin Yount and George Brett and Derek Jeter went down the line. Same for dozens, really hundreds of other players.
Stanton makes a lot of money, and Don Mattingly says, “he acts like a utility infielder, modest, humble, no ego.” Trout gets the relief pitcher’s lunch. Even the richest and the best simply want to be the pedal brake their teammates can depend on.
17 Year old Mike Trout