Sam Miller: Mike Trout Is Fun: Fact. Staring through binoculars at the perfect franchise player.

[Chuck]

Installment 11:

“When Mike Trout reported to spring training in mid-February 2020, he had more career WAR through the age of 27 than any player in Major League Baseball history.” —Me

OR

"Since 2014, Mike Trout's 151 home runs are the fourth most in baseball." —Fun Fact on the Angels’ Stadium scoreboard, May 2018

1.
When a game begins, Mike Trout is in center field. In the top of just one first inning, he: kicks grass, smoothes kicked grass, stares into his glove, fiddles with straps of glove, removes glove, checks the count on the left-field scoreboard, checks the hitter’s stats on the right-field scoreboard, randomly salutes at nothing, checks his belt at least 10 times, unclasps and reclasps it, salutes the number of outs to his corner outfielders, signals to the dugout to get his defensive positioning, spits a bunch, blows bubbles with his gum, feels his glove, taps his glove, takes a demonstratively deep breath, and keeps looking around like he thought he just heard somebody call his name, which, to be fair, happens a few dozen times a game just within his earshot.

He has more energy than one can use sensibly. During the National Anthem, he usually looks like a windsock in a row of fence posts. When he jogs toward the dugout after a half-inning in the field, he’ll just randomly veer—sometimes to avoid the infield dirt, sometimes onto the infield dirt, only to veer seems to be the point. He pays close attention to surfaces that have nothing to do with him. Once, after he tried to steal second base and the pitch was fouled off, he stopped maybe 60 feet from first base and smoothed a spot of the infield dirt with his foot. He’ll probably never stand on that spot of dirt again, but he saw something wrong and he had time. So he fixed it.  

Late one game, he reaches down and picks up what looks like a blade of grass and puts it in his back pocket. You actually see this a lot if you’re watching him through binoculars. You see him running to center field and he suddenly stops 10 feet past the infield and picks something tiny up and tucks it in his pocket. Or you see him craning his neck between pitches and suddenly he leans over with his bare hand, grabs something, stashes it away in his pocket. There’s nothing out there but grass. What’s he want with grass?

2.
No baseball player and baseball statistic grew up as symbiotically as Mike Trout and Wins Above Replacement did. The all-in-one value stat had emerged slightly before Trout, but in his 2012 rookie season, WAR founds its killer application. By counting everything, a statistic was, for the first time, able to be cited conclusively1 to show that one player was more valuable than another, even if they played different positions, had different skills, had different workloads, and so on. So while Miguel Cabrera won the Triple Crown in 2012—the greatest feat possible under the pre-WAR rules of stat-comprising—Trout was, to the emergent baseball fan, obviously better. We knew this thanks to slightly abstract details like park factors and positional adjustments, and previously undercounted events like scoring from first on a double, and a belief in the concept of defining a clear and universal objective (producing/suppressing runs) and then measuring each player’s incremental progress toward that objective. WAR got Mike Trout on the cover of ESPN Magazine, which served as a national advertisement for both entities: “WAR Is The Answer” was the headline of the accompanying article, which, incidentally, I was the author of.

Like citing scripture, WAR isn’t compelling to somebody who doesn’t accept its sacredness. In what we might call the Trout paradox, the more that went into WAR, the less we actually had to say about him, because everything was already in the WAR. Without WAR, a partisan could have spent several hours demonstrating just how many ways Trout was better than Miguel Cabrera or Bryce Harper. With WAR, the partisan could only get exasperated: All that data in the vat and some people still wouldn’t gulp it down.

“When do I get to quit hearing about how great Mike Trout is,” my uncle cried out one day, as he and my dad and I were having the “best player in baseball” debate. Obviously Trout is great. Uncle knows that. But enough fun facts about his WAR!

At some point during Trout’s peak, and continuing through 2023, I developed an occasional habit of taking a pair of binoculars out to Angels games and watching nothing but Trout. Maybe a dozen times—from batting practice through that night’s game—whether he was in the field or at the plate or in the dugout, I watched him. (When he jogged down the tunnel between innings to watch video of his previous at-bat, I used to stare into the dark of the tunnel, awaiting his climb back up the steps. Later I would give my eyes a break.) The idea was to see the WAR, and to develop something like John McPhee’s seminal Bill Bradley profile—to explain how Trout produced all the wonderful baseball value we’d been counting. But it became more interesting to see Trout producing something we weren’t counting at all, something fundamentally outside the realm of counting. Call it the Trout Vibe, or the Trout Experience, or just the Trout Relationship To The World. Unlike his WAR, it was something that was unperformed. It was just Mike Trout, without an objective, being his self, at play.

3.
After each half-inning that he plays the field, Trout puts his cap and glove in the same spot at the top step of the Angels’ dugout. One game, he was involved in a confusing play in center field—a ball had rolled along the top of the wall, over the yellow home run line, then back into the field of play. When Trout got back to the dugout after the third out of the inning, his cap and glove in hand, a small group of teammates was waiting for him with questions about what had happened, what the umpire had said, etc. But they were all standing right in his cap-and-glove spot.

Trout talked to them for a moment, answering questions, describing the play, holding onto his cap and glove. Then the questions ended, but the teammates still stood where they were, discussing the play amongst themselves. So Trout… walked down to the other side of the dugout, still holding his cap, holding his glove. He didn’t shove his teammates out of his way so he could put his cap and glove down. He didn’t even politely ask them to accommodate him. He adjusted. He gave them that space. The best baseball player in the world, but he accommodated them. He walked down to the other side of the dugout, lingered near the batting helmets, talked to other teammates while holding his cap and glove firmly in two hands. The crowd of teammates near the steps dispersed, and when he saw an opening he quickly walked back and finally lay down his cap and his glove.

4.
He looks always eager. When his team is batting, he’ll put his batting helmet on even when there are two outs and his turn in the batting order is still three spots away. In the middle innings of one game, with Trout batting third in his team’s lineup, he was sitting with the no. 2 hitter on the top step of the dugout. The no. 8 hitter was walking to the plate, so Trout’s teammate nonchalantly stood up and went to get his helmet ready. Trout stayed seated on the bench. His leg started shaking a little, then thumping harder. He held out like this for 15 seconds, then followed his teammate to the helmet rack to put his helmet on. The chances were perhaps 1 in 30 that he’d bat in the inning, but it is as though he might have willed it into existence by his readiness. He got his helmet and bat, but the area was crowded with all the batters who were scheduled to bat before him. So he went back to the bench to wait, helmet on, bat upright, leg a’thump.

5.
When he get to the on-deck circle, he bends down to get a donut for his bat, and while he’s tipped upside-down he gives a little pinky-finger wave to a young fan sitting up against the net. Any wave from Mike Trout would be nice, any acknowledgement, but Trout is really good at all of this. He waves from this disorienting, unnatural position, inverting the power dynamic and turning Trout into the kid and the kid into the not-nervous normal one. Plus, he waves with his pinky. He’s a marble statue of a man, but he activates the most delicate part of his body to say hello. The kid smiles, you smile, then Trout smiles.

When he’s doing warm-up throws between innings, it comes time to throw the ball into the stands for a souvenir (a friendly deed which, it should be noted, many/most outfielders don’t even bother with). He is always the one who does the throwing into the stands, which doesn’t seem like much, but a ball thrown to you by Mike Trout is obviously much different than a ball thrown to you by Hunter Renfroe, no offense Hunter Renfroe. By taking that role, Trout creates wealth out of thin air. He also makes sure he throws the ball from far away, way farther than he has to, because the long flight of a ball thrown by Mike Trout multiplies the personal thrill of catching that ball, like compounding interest.

Mike Trout seems to always find the “BIRTHDAY KID!” signs in the stands, always gets that kid a ball even if it takes until the eighth inning. When the scoreboard implores the crown to join in a rhythmic clap, Trout in center field sometimes joins in.

In the middle of one at-bat, between pitches, a girl in her early teens stood up. “MIKE TROUT!” she yelled. He turned from his position in center field. She waved. “I’M YOUR BIGGEST FAN!”

He lifted his glove, waving back. She gave him a thumbs up. “IT WAS NICE MEETING YOU!”

He watched for an extra second, as if expecting to be asked for something else. He is often asked for something else.

A few innings later, Mike Trout’s biggest fan was buying Dippin’ Dots. I asked her about the interaction. “I didn’t actually know who he was,” she said. “I just saw the name on the jersey and the guy next to me told me, ‘That’s Mike Trout.’”

6.
When it’s his turn to bat and he knocks the donut off his bat in the on-deck circle, he sometimes picks the donut up on his bat knob and holds it out for the teammate who is coming out to replace him in the on-deck circle. When the catcher flings his mask off to chase a foul pop, he’ll pick the mask up and hand it to him. When the third-base coach tosses a piece of a baserunner’s equipment toward the dugout, Trout picks it up and puts it away. When Albert Pujols got career hit no. 2,999 a few years ago, Trout personally delivered it to the MLB authenticator sitting near the dugout.

(Once, at a game I wasn’t at, he broke his bat on a base hit. A large fragment came around and nicked the umpire and the catcher. Trout stopped for a moment running out of the batters box to apologize. It probably cost him a double.)

He stares interestedly at whomever he’s talking to, and he talks to anybody on the field who is in a uniform. He talks to the umpire on the way out to center field, not a passing jab but long enough that Trout actually stops jogging and stands facing him. He shakes the hand of the cop who guards the railing along the left-field line. He plays games with the bat boy. When he used to talk to Albert Pujols—his most common conversational companion in the dugout when Pujols was still on the Angels—Pujols would stare straight ahead at the field, but Trout always looked intently at Pujols, his arm perhaps draped around Pujols’ shoulder.

He’s incredibly tactile. When he walks out to his position, he often has an arm around a teammate. He’ll touch as many as four people on his way from the dugout to center field—not incidental touches, but squeezed shoulders and handshakes. During pitching changes, the corner outfielders come to center field; he gives them high fives with his glove when they leave. When the right fielder makes a nice play for the final out of an inning, he waits so he can give a high five and run into the dugout with him. When he walks from one end of the dugout to the other, he might have five conversations, and he’ll reach out opposite to put a hand on a shoulder each time. He adjusts a teammate’s hat for him. He gives his hitting coach’s neck a squeeze. He taps the umpire and the opposing catcher before his first at-bat of each game. When The Athletic polled players about who the friendliest person to chat with at first base is, “every answer given was a first baseman except for Mike Trout, who somehow got three votes.”

7.
An ongoing storyline in Trout’s career has been his relative anonymity. This is part of why my uncle doubts his greatness—if Trout’s so great, how come my uncle never actually sees him? As I write this, the best basketball player of the past generation has 160 million followers on Instagram; Trout has 2 million. By that standard he’s as famous as, say, the third-best Dallas Maverick.

One explanation might be that baseball is popular primarily among an older demographic whose interest in a player can’t drive social media attention. Another is that it’s hard to market individual superstars in a sport where those superstars can’t take over a game the way a quarterback can, and where a great player like Trout can’t even be guaranteed a postseason spotlight. A third is that Major League Baseball has simply failed to train a generation of fans to know and understand the sport. “The first thing to establish about Willie Mays is that there really is one,” the great columnist Jim Murray once wrote. Baseball has ceded so much of the public’s attention to other sports that the average American just doesn’t understand (though many baseball fans do) that there really was a Mike Trout, that any baseball player was as good at baseball as LeBron and Serena and Brady were at their sports.

Or, if you’re a little bit weird, you could blame Trout. "Mike has made decisions on what he wants to do, doesn't want to do, how he wants to spend his free time or not spend his free time," MLB commissioner Rob Manfred famously lamented. "I think we could help him make his brand very big. But he has to make a decision to engage. It takes time and effort."

But Trout is not hidden. Two hours before every game, he takes the field for batting practice, which is often followed by a lot of time spent meeting kids, signing handmade signs, stretching/jogging/joking with his teammates. Then comes a game, three hours. And then to the clubhouse, where he’s nearly always in demand for post-game interviews. Call it five hours a day, for at least six months a year, he is fully visible, fidgeting so you know which one is him. It’s all unrehearsed and unrecorded. He spends more time in view, in public, than just about any celebrity you can think of. The world can choose whether or not to watch, but Trout is not hidden.

8.
Willie Mays was a superstar just about from his debut, but he was not universally beloved by the people who wanted to make him famous. Newspaper columnists considered him too aloof. Mays more or less just shrugged. “I don’t pursue people,” he said.

It was said Mays only trusted ballplayers, pets and kids. When he moved into a new home in San Francisco, he hosted 30 neighborhood kids for a party. He gave kids rides to the ballpark. Johnnie Alberta Wade, a maid who cooked and cleaned for Mays for six years, would say, 50 years later, that she remembered him mostly for his kindness. “If you aren’t a nice person, you can’t pretend for six years.”2

Trout, too, isn’t pretending. “He’s the most authentic professional baseball player of status that I’ve ever been around,” says an executive who knows him well. “The things he likes to do are fantasy football, the Eagles, ping pong. He’s a slice of Americana, of the average person.”

He takes pictures with Flat Stanley for a team employee’s niece. Until he began to take on more of a team-leader role, he sometimes sat with support staff on the team bus. He coaches a teammate on how to shoot the toy basketball in the clubhouse. He gives stock “aw shucks” answers in the post-game interviews until he’s asked about either a teammate’s achievement. Then he lights up.

This seems like the dream, for a league desperate to connect to younger generations: A relatable superstar who is universally beloved, has some quirky hobbies and a doggo with an Instagram account, is extremely photogenic whenever there’s a child in the frame, and can’t wait to do baseball—while being fearlessly authentic. “To millennials, you don’t have to be amazing. But you do have to be authentic,” one academic wrote. Trout is both!

9.
There are limitations on what we can ever know about celebrities, and through a pair of binoculars trained on Mike Trout those limitations are clear. When he has to adjust his cup, he pushes it down, subtly, with his wrist, rather than clutching it and adjusting it upward, vulgarly. Or does he? I’m probably projecting. When he doesn’t like an umpire’s call on a pitch, he turns away from the umpire, never toward, avoiding conflict. Or maybe I’m imagining that. I swear I see him reading the Fun Facts about opposing players on the scoreboard, but that’s too cute to be true.

For most celebrities, those limitations don’t matter. We have, traditionally, expected our celebrities to be not authentic but amazing, to dwell like gods atop mountains of fame, success, money—and relatively predictable drama. We understand most celebrities to be performing an archetype, and we have enough experience with those archetypes that we can flatten everything down to fit the narrative. It’s all very easy to pair with a product.

Trout does not give us the narrative, so it can be frustrating to not totally understand what he’s doing. Because his actions are apparently who he genuinely is—instead of a narrative shortcut to help us “understand” him—he is not designed to be comprehended.

Garrett Richards, who was Trout’s longtime teammate, once told Buster Olney that in the minor leagues Trout was always stuffing pockets full of grass, carrying on a family tradition. (His dad, Jeff Trout, collected dirt from the minor league stadiums he played in.)

“Some days it's grass, some days it's just like pieces of trash or bubblegum wrappers,” Trout told Olney. “I don't know, it's weird.”

So it was grass! It is weird. 

10.
In the few minutes between the National Anthem and the first pitch, Mike Trout was signing autographs along the third base line. Trout is very talented at these few minutes, and by talented we don’t mean generous—though he is that—but rather that he’s good at it, effective, strategic, savvy. One thing he does is bounce around a lot, signing eight items and then abruptly jogging 20 feet in one direction or the other so that the gravity his autograph hand exerts doesn’t create too heavy a crowd around him. A heavy crowd would block out kids. It would make it hard for him to scan the crowd and target the folks with handmade items, which seem to be his clear priority. So he bops, and the crowd has to reform around the kids and handmade signs he bops over to, until the crowd is heavy again, and he bops. He’s good at this like he’s good at baseball.

When he’s spent his very last minute before he has to be back in to the dugout so he can turn back around and jog onto the field to grab some grass and play the first inning, he heads back down the warning track. He stops halfway down the left-field line and leans into the stands to give a woman—let’s estimate she’s 60—a hug.

That’s Peggy. She’s a lifelong baseball fan from New Jersey (like Trout!) who watches every Angels game from her seat, 25 or so rows up off the field. If you watch Mike Trout through a pair of binoculars you’ll see him give Peggy a hug just about every day. It’s not much of a story, she says: “He’s just a very good person. Very polite.”

And…

…after thinking it over, she decides that’s all she’ll say to me. She doesn’t hug Mike Trout for attention, and he doesn’t hug her for attention, so she very, very politely declines an interview. “You don’t want to interview me,” she says. “I guess I’m just like Mike Trout. He just likes to play. And I just like to watch it.”

https://pebblehunting.substack.com/p/mike-trout-is-fun-fact?utm_campaign=email-post&r=udsyc&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[Angelsjunky]

I truly love this guy.

[T.G.]

54 minutes ago, Angelsjunky said:

I truly love this guy.

Sam Miller?  Yeah, he's a terrific writer.

[Dgar24]

Sam Miller , thanks for the reminder. Mike Trout, what a blessing to watch.

 

[CaliAngel]

He's the best ever.

And I get lost in his eyes.

He's SOOOO DREAMMMMYYYYY

[halodground]

I’ve had a couple really positive interactions with Trout and my kids in Tempe. He truly comes off as a humble, friendly, and kind human. 

I would still love for him to return to dominance for the next 5-6 years to solidify his legacy as one of the GOATs, selfish and shallow of me as that may be.