Mike Trout isn’t big in that Vegas doorman, got into creatine pretty hard for a while, I’m-totally-texting-this-dude-when-I-need-to-move-or-maybe-combat-a-Himalayan-brown-bear way that some major league baseball players are. No, that’s Albert Pujols. Trout is more thick. Like, every portion of his body is covered with dull, rounded muscles you didn’t know could get like that, thick. Like, this is what the athlete of the future looks like, thick. With that build, a shaved head, his constant lack of facial hair and an impossibly wide face, Trout looks a little like he was created in a lab. Like he stepped out of a comic book and into a pair of Nikes.
That’s probably not what happened. By all reports, Trout is earthly and grew up in a tiny former military town called Millville in downstate New Jersey. He still lives there with his parents during offseasons in the two-story house he grew up in. He’s just 22, and he spends an awful lot of time on his phone, as everyone who’s in their 20s does. He’s just 22, and he’s the best player in baseball.
His unparalleled numbers and righteous accomplishments are well documented; how he’s the youngest to ever do this and the first to ever do that. We’ve heard all about the numerous long-dead ballplayers from eras when fastballs travelled the speed limit that he’s usurped on leaderboards and how he’s really, truly as good as it gets, or has gotten this far at least. Still, he’s the subject of constant debate and so many get caught up in all the commotion around him and miss the true key to understanding Trout. I know what the key is. And I’m going to tell you about it in a minute.
It is agreed that there isn’t anyone quite like Trout in baseball, and for such a generational talent you’d think we could just sit back and enjoy watching him playing the game he loves. But the taller the statue, the more the birds want to defecate on it, which may explain why there’s been some questioning of Trout’s greatness these days. The guy’s in a slump—the worst of his career since he reached the majors in 2011 as a 19-year-old who seemed more than a little overwhelmed by it all.
After going 1-for-5 in Philadelphia Tuesday night—on Millville Night of all nights, with 8,000 fans from South Jersey in the stands cheering his every breath—Trout is 6-for-his-last-43 since the beginning of May, a string that equates to an unseemly batting average of .132. Over that span he’s walked six times and hit a couple sacrifice flies, which helps lessen the blow, but he’s also struck out 13 times, including four punch-out’s in one game against the Blue Jays on Mother’s Day. He’d only done that once before in his career—a few weeks ago in Detroit.
It hasn’t been pretty. But in spite of the slump, and because he’s Mike Trout, his numbers on the season are still elite. In the American League he’s first in wins above replacement, fifth in weighted runs created plus and eighth in OPS, which are realities no one could possibly complain about. But evidently, when your first two full seasons are the stuff of video games, the expectations get a little inflated.
Empirically speaking, the issue is that he’s striking out too much, which has long been a facet of Trout’s game as he’s displayed patience beyond his years at the plate, taking the third-most pitches on the black of any qualified hitter last season and often getting burned for it by trigger-happy umpires. But lately Trout has simply been missing the ball. Of those 13 strikeouts during the slump, 11 have been swinging. That’s strange for a player with a career contact rate over 80 percent and one that chased just 23.2% of the time last season.
And, hey—that’s fixable. Maybe he’s trying too hard to reverse his results and betraying the approach that got him to where he is. It happens. He’s young and in a slump. Him not coming out of it—unlikely in a very, very big way—would be the stranger occurrence than him going through it. But what he cannot change is who he is as a person (we’ll continue with the assumption that he is, in fact, human, although the jury is still out).
The other objection he’s run into of late is that he’s not monumental enough of a guy. That he’s bland when interviewed, unanimated in front of cameras, dull and cliché-spitting when facing a microphone. That he’s not Jeter-ey enough. That if he really wants to be The Face of Baseball and continue forward as the once-in-a-era, iconic talent that he is, he must assume a more commanding, electric personality. Or so the argument goes.
What the argument misses is that Trout is not only a product of the new era of baseball development, where young players head out for travel ball before their 12th birthdays and finish high school early to enrol in junior colleges as teenagers and play at higher levels. He’s also a product of the new era of professional sports coverage. Where every youthful misstep is made on camera and every candid quote is sent around the globe. Where the baseball press has become so saturated, and the obsession with prospects has become so fierce, that young players with professional futures learn incredibly early that the best thing to say to the media is nothing at all. That you can satisfy the sports-entertainment complex’s constant desire for comment with a lazy roll of hackneyed maxims and truisms.
This is great for those who approach the vocation of sports journalism as a type of prosaic exercise in quote gathering, which, by a non-scientific poll, is somewhere around 85 percent of those with press passes these days. Need 20 seconds of sound for the news or some loosely strung together banalities to pad out those column inches? Trout’s got you covered. But if you’d like to have a more blunt, contemplative discussion of what it’s like to be Mike Trout, the man isn’t going to give you that. He won’t tell you what it’s like to lay ruins to the game of baseball from practically the moment he arrived. What it’s like to be a few years out of high school and handed a stack of papers that say you’ll make 144 million pre-tax dollars before you’re 30. What it’s like to be the prodigy.
He’s going to be dull and it’s going to be fine. Because everything he does in the space that matters—the field, not the clubhouse—is downright exhilarating. There are things that pop out at you when you watch Trout live, things that come absolutely screaming off the page. The sound of the ball off his bat; How stupid fast he is; The sheer velocity of his line drives; The way he roars through first on the most routine ground balls and dives headlong into everything, popping up to his feet as soon as he’s made the catch or stolen the base, as if he’s a commando scanning the perimeter for threats.
The guy doesn’t just speak in clichés—he plays in them. Sure, he’s been the poster boy for baseball’s advanced statistical movement for the past two years, as he’s fallen short of an AL MVP award twice to a man who had an awful lots of RBIs but, by most contemporary numbers, was an inferior ballplayer to Trout. But the things Trout does on the field are the sort of things that fuel those who ballyhoo the old school baseball counting numbers and make weathered scouts flash coffee-stained teeth and pencil in boilerplates like “never takes an at-bat off” and “swings with authority.” Basically, Trout is transcendent. The numbers tell you so much about him, but so do your eyes.
And that’s the key to understanding Mike Trout. Maybe you missed it earlier. You just have to enjoy watching him play the game.