This Season Promised to Be Mike Trout’s Greatest. Now It May Never Come

Every baseball season at its start is a blue Tiffany box tied with white satin ribbon in the palm of your hand. Something special will be revealed, guaranteed. The mysteries are in only the particulars and magnitude of its bejeweled splendor.

We could have made one easy guess about this season. It promised to be the greatest season of the greatest player of this generation, Mike Trout.

Instead, the coronavirus pandemic has stolen the probability of such a gift—the gift of one full season of peak Trout. It is one of a million small consequences that today mean nothing against the global threat to human life. But within the baseball community it is a consequence that will have aesthetic and historical import.

Trout turns 29 on Aug. 7. The Angels’ center fielder is coming off a season in which he set career highs for home runs (45) and slugging (.645), even though he missed the final three weeks of the season with a foot injury that had been bothering him for at least the month prior. He has missed an average of 33 games per year over the past three seasons. He likely will miss many more than that this year, making it four straight years in the prime of his career that Trout will not play more than 140 games. If we see Major League Baseball again this summer, we should be surprised and grateful.

A realistic simulation: Trout is opening day Strat star

And now, a bit of new that I hope makes at least some of you happy:

Mike Trout hit two home runs off Zack Greinke and scored four times to help the Los Angeles Angels beat the Houston Astros 9-6 on opening day.

Alas, the game was played on a computer, not on the field. But as fans of the popular sports game Strat-O-Matic can attest, make-believe boxscores can be fun too.

Fifteen of them were generated Thursday by Strat-O-Matic — one for every real game postponed on opening day because of the coronavirus. The results came via computer simulations, which the New York-based company will continue to run daily while the real thing is on hiatus.

“People miss baseball, us included,” said Adam Richman, whose father created Strat-O-Matic as an 11-year-old in 1948. “This is a way to bring a little bit of baseball to everyone in their homes. We know baseball will be back, but until then there’s Strat-O-Matic.”

Mike Trout’s Inevitable Decline

Meditations on death.

Is Mike Trout’s Excellence Boring?

This week, we saw footage of Mike Trout being unkind to a golf ball. He sent it into near-earth orbit with ease as a crowd of cackling onlookers has the only reasonable reaction. If he were a superstar with superstar exposure, this would have been quite the branding opportunity for Topgolf. Instead, it became an opportunity for the baseball world to debate the greatness of his feat.

What did he really do, some asked. Anything more than what a skilled golfer could have done? And shouldn’t Mike Trout be able to do that? Why would we be surprised that he could? Enjoying something, even an 18-second clip of a dude whacking a ball, is passé, and on a more vibrant, upbeat planet, we would have absorbed the footage, whistled quietly, and moved onto the various other 18-second segments that would make up our day. Maybe it’s the well-earned cynicism of today’s baseball fan or the sea of writers looking for topics [waves aggressively at you], but that’s not how we do things anymore.

Other players have wielded a golf club with lesser results. Vince Coleman once bashed Dwight Gooden in the shoulder blade while practicing his swing in the Mets clubhouse. Ted Williams agreed to and easily lost a driving contest with track star and golf champ Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1948. Golf has met baseball on its own turf, too; Sam Snead whacked a drive over the 89-foot scoreboard from home plate at Wrigley Field in 1951 as part of an Opening Day celebration.

So perhaps our nerves are a bit worn down from seeing shows of monstrous golf strength and/or incidental Met-on-Met violence over the years. But mostly what it might be is the utter normalization of Mike Trout’s massive talent.

*Jumps under table, covers head*

Mike Trout blasted a golf ball into another galaxy

Just when you think it’s impossible for Mike Trout to be any more impressive, he does this.

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Trout’s drive, which happened at a TopGolf in Arizona over the weekend, is one of the most impressive sporting feats we’ve seen by an athlete outside of their primary sport. And it isn’t just the club speed or the contact he makes on the drive. If you watch the video closely, there’s a TV next to the range that captures Trout’s ball flying over the net. He hit a dang home run in golf, but what does that actually mean? By all accounts, the average range at a TopGolf is 250 yards long, and the net is 150 feet high. This means the drive was not only long, but WAY out there, with enough height to clear the net.

Without knowing the club speed it’s difficult to accurately estimate exactly how far Trout’s drive traveled, but it’s safe to say this was well over 300 yards — which is absolutely astonishing for a baseball player just goofing around on an off-day.

So, which premier event will Trout be more likely to participate in at some point: the Ryder Cup, or the World Series?

MLB releases statement clearing Angels’ Mike Trout after HGH accusation

Major League Baseball and the union issued a joint statement on Friday afternoon saying that no player has ever received an exemption to use Human Growth Hormone, reacting to a rumor about Angels All-Star Mike Trout that seeped into social media a day earlier.

While not using Trout’s name, the statement was clearly a reaction to a Thursday Instagram post – that was deleted and then retracted – alleging that Trout had received MLB approval to use HGH because of a thyroid condition.

MLB grants about 100 Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs) every year, allowing players to use otherwise banned substances for legitimate medical purposes. The vast majority of them are stimulants that are prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

So, anyone have any wild and unsubstantiated rumors they wish to make up now?

Fantasy Baseball All-Decade Team: Mike Trout, Justin Verlander, and the rest of the 2010s studs

The 2010s was a challenging decade for fantasy baseball managers, with pitchers and hitters each enjoying separate phases of league-wide dominance. As the league-wide plan shifted to drawing walks, increasing launch angles and avoiding risks on the basepaths, wise managers also shifted their priorities. With the decade coming to a close, let’s take a look at a team of players who dominated the fantasy landscape.

I will freely admit that I am not involved in fantasy baseball, and that the way they appraise players may not match my own- but does this list seem odd to anyone else in certain regards?

Numbers Suggest Mike Trout’s Best Days Are Already Behind Him

Why? Well, as with seemingly everything else in baseball these days, all roads lead to launch angle.

Once you place among the 10 highest average launch angles in either league (among the top 250 or so in batted balls), you’re asking for trouble. Virtually every player meeting that criteria since 2016 has declined or disappeared in pretty short order. You see, extremely high average launch angle is an “old player” characteristic.

Mikey, we hardly knew ye.

MLB announces an “All-MLB” team

Major League Baseball announced today that it is launching an official “All-MLB Team,” recognizing the top performances by players in the 2019 regular season.  The inaugural All-MLB choices will be announced on Tuesday, December 10 during the Baseball Winter Meetings in San Diego.

Like most of MLB’s more recent awards and honors, the All-MLB team will be selected via a combination of a fan vote and a panel of experts. As for the fan vote, starting today and continuing through December 3 at 5:00 PM Eastern, fans may vote for their 2019 All-MLB choices. Like the other fan votes, fans can vote more than once — once every 24 hours on this thing — at MLB.com. No one at MLB ever tells you that that’s a nifty way of driving traffic to a page sponsored by a single, exclusive paid sponsor — in this case Scotts — but such is business in the 21st century.

The non-fan-voting portion of this will be decided by a “decorated panel of media members, broadcasters, former players and other officials throughout the game.” The panel vote will be weighted equally to the fan vote. There will be a first team and a second team All-MLB squad.

2019 MVP Award winners announced | MLB.com

Mike Trout and Cody Bellinger began the 2019 season in such different places that it was a stretch to imagine that they were on their way to being mentioned in the same breath. As one built on a legacy of greatness, the other was still very much a work in progress.

On Thursday, they achieved the highest individual honor—Most Valuable Player. Trout won in the American League for the third time in six seasons with a performance that included a career-high 45 home runs.

Bellinger was named the NL MVP for a season that featured 47 homers, 34 doubles and an NL-leading 351 total bases. Two years after being named the NL Rookie of the Year, the 24-year-old Dodgers outfielder used the 2019 season to establish himself once and for all as one of the game’s best players.

Trout, Verlander, Yates win Baseball Digest awards

NEW YORK (AP) — Mike Trout has been chosen major league player of the year by Baseball Digest and eBay.

The star outfielder from the Los Angeles Angels edged Dodgers slugger Cody Bellinger by two points in voting by a 17-member panel of baseball writers, broadcasters, former players and executives.

Houston Astros ace Justin Verlander was selected pitcher of the year and San Diego Padres closer Kirby Yates got picked as the top reliever.

The awards were announced Thursday. Trout also won in 2014.

And now, awards seasons has officially begun….