With baby on the way, Trout unsure if he’ll play

“Honestly, I still don’t feel comfortable with the baby coming,” Trout said via Zoom. “Obviously with the baby coming there’s a lot of stuff going through my mind right now, my wife’s mind, my family. Trying to get the safest and most cautious way to get through a season. I told [general manager] Billy [Eppler] and I told a bunch of guys, it’s going to be tough. I have to be really cautious the next few weeks. The biggest thing is I don’t want to test positive and bring it back to my wife. I’ve thought hard about this and I’m still thinking about this.”

Trout, 28, worked out with his teammates at Angel Stadium on Friday—the first day of official workouts—but he wore a mask while running the bases and during outfield drills. Trout wants to play but said he has nightly conversations with his wife and things could change.

“Obviously, sports is really big for the country right now but we’re risking our families and our lives to go out there and play for everyone,” Trout said. “My mindset is to play. I want to play. It’s just a tough situation. I have to play it by ear. You never know what’ll happen tomorrow or the next day. There could be an outbreak. There are a lot of questions I don’t have the answer to.”

Where Mike Trout Stands Out Most

If someone asked you what Mike Trout’s signature skill is, what would your answer be? You might say it’s his power, even though he’s never led his league in homers, or his elite approach, even though he still strikes out a little more often than he walks. If you watched him in person when he was much younger, you might say it isn’t even his steady hitting that defines him, but the way the 6-foot-2, 235-pound mammoth of a man moves, sprinting with top-line speed to steal bases and gliding to field balls hit to center field. The correct answer, of course, isn’t any of those things. What separates Mike Trout from the pack is that he is one of the best, if not the best, at virtually everything. He is the sum of several staggeringly impressive parts.

Still, it feels a bit odd that the player we think of as the best in the game wouldn’t have any specific skill that stands far above the rest of the competition. But while it’s true that Trout has never cruised to a batting title, or demolished the field in homers or walks, the baseball community is constantly coming up with new statistics and methods through which we can evaluate players. Trends, trials, and technology help those new tools grow and improve, and with each one that sticks, we have a new chance to discover a player’s distinctive traits.

In recent years, many of those new revelations have come along because of Statcast, which has introduced an increasing number of statistics into even the casual fan’s lexicon, a technology that gives us a peek into data and visuals we didn’t previously have access to. One of the more recent additions to Statcast’s suite of tools is Swing/Take value, which sorts each pitch into four attack zones based on where it crosses the plate — the heart of the plate, the shadow of the plate, chase pitches, and waste pitches — as well as whether the hitter swung or took the pitch, and uses Tom Tango’s RE288 table to assign the result of each pitch a run value. The result is sort of a hybrid set of data, a glimpse at the particulars of a hitter’s plate approach, as well as his impact when he does decide to swing.

Take, for example, the Swing/Take profile of Anthony Rendon, who led all hitters in Statcast’s Swing/Take runs metric, at +65.

That is, other than his field.

Mike Trout raises issues with MLB’s potential Arizona plan, says ‘it has to be realistic’

Although Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout is widely held as the best player in Major League Baseball, he seldom goes out of his way to comment on many topics, or to otherwise insert himself into the story. Trout’s taciturn nature can work against him, as it limits his visibility and worldwide exposure, but it also grants extra weight to the statements he does make.

Wednesday provided an example of that effect at work. Trout joined Mike Tirico for an interview on NBC Sports Network, during which he discussed MLB’s proposed plans to return this year, albeit with some alterations in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus. Those could include having players all report to a single state (likely Arizona) and remain in isolation to avoid becoming infected.

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For those who would prefer to read Trout’s words, here you go:

“I obviously want to play as fast as we can. Get to a city, maybe Arizona, they’re throwing out Florida … but being quarantined in a city, I was reading for—if we play— a couple of months, it would be difficult for some guys. What are you going to do with family members? My wife is pregnant, what am I going to do when she goes into labor—am I going to have to quarantine for two weeks after I come back? Obviously I can’t miss the birth of our first child. There are a lot of red flags, there are a lot of questions. Obviously we would have to agree on it as players. I think the mentality is that we want to get back as soon as we can. But it has to be realistic. It can’t be sitting in our hotel rooms, and just going from the field to the hotel room and not being able to do anything. I think that’s pretty crazy.”

Living in Sim: We made a team of 26 Mike Trouts. It lost 50 straight games

The people over at “MLB The Show 20” either can’t — or don’t want to — help me. I can’t say I’m surprised. Honestly, I’m just thankful they didn’t laugh in my face when I told them I was planning to create a full 26-man roster of nothing but Mike Trouts. It’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s up there.

By the time their email comes back, I’m already days into this experiment and have yet to simulate a single game. I’ve suspected for at least a day that this project is cursed, and that the video game is actively sabotaging me. The email only sends me further down a darker path.

It all started with a simple question: Can Mike Trout really do it all? Trout is easily the best player of his generation, and could go down as the best to ever play the game at the end of his career. If anyone could use the power to clone himself 25 times and field a team entirely made of himself, it’s Mike Trout.

Maybe with a team full of himself, Trout will get the Los Angeles Angels back to the playoffs and make the deep postseason run Trout deserves.

Oh, a lot of people here aren’t going to be happy about reading this at all…..

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?