Tonight marks the 1,000 MLB game of Mike Trout’s career. If you live in the wrong time zone, or the wrong MLB market, or the wrong universe, it’s your own damned fault for not fixing that so that you also could have borne first-hand and personal witness to the wonderment of Mike Trout.
You have seen and read a great deal of stats that make the impossible attempt of demonstrating the impact Trout is having on history. Since he has been so far beyond superlatives, none of them do Trout proper justice. Let me rectify that.
Unlike decades of famous names before him, Trout plays in the most competitive era we have ever known. He plays against people with far more athletic prowess, and in far greater numbers, and with far more specialization than any other generation of baseball player. He has yet to be on this planet for 27 full years. And in his only 999 games, look what Trout has done.
In only another 2.3 fWAR he will be on top of that list, and he has spotted the only two guys ahead of him - Mickey Mantle and Ty Cobb - 103 games and 144 games, respectively. Mike will top that list and own that distinction in just a couple of weeks.
Move forward one year, to 27, and Trout is still 7th. But he is only 7.6 fWAR behind that lead. There is an outside chance he reaches that pinnacle before this October. He has spotted most of those very few guy more than an entire season. And nobody else today is doing anything close to what Trout is doing with the start of his career. He has lapped the field of his peers.
Only those people who got to watch a young Babe Ruth have seen what we are seeing and because of their era I can argue that they still did not see this. But none of those people are alive today, anyway. This means that those of us who are able to get to an AL West stadium are the only living souls who have ever enjoyed this much of this kind of a baseball experience. Not the mere taste, but the immersion. And those of us close enough to Anaheim have gotten to see it more than most. We are truly blessed. A million thank yous to Mike Trout, his wife, his sister, his brother, his parents, his greater family, and all the friends and teachers who surrounded him on his journey to the Halos. He has been grand. And for the 1,000 time, he is ours.
Let’s meander through a page of One-Grand-Mike-Trout-Links:
A Little Bit Of Shohei Ohtani News
Just because Shohei Ohtani is good at playing two-way doesn’t mean just anybody can pull it off. But Jared Walsh wants to take his shot...........
Jerry Dipoto still had all this international bonus money left littering his offices after the debacle of his failed attempt to land Ohtani. So he just went and spent it. And he still didn’t get an Ohtani.........
A Little Bit Of Mike Trout News
Mike Trout is having the 1st of the 7 greatest years by a baseball player in our lifetime, and all SportsIllustrated can do about is write the same old, tired, bullshit. (Could it be because they want to have such an amazement playing for their personal favorite team?)...........Other writers have gotten over it, and are back to reporting straight up what a magnificent tail Trout is blazing..........Let’s machine gun off a blast of trout Porn Links: Mike is NOT in any slump.....He is getting better as the season progresses, so WATCH OUT SEPTEMBER!.....He is turning into the perfect player.....Doing things that are unreal.....And he is even making Mike Trout of past seasons look bad.....
Yeah, we should follow this a little more. Trout has already bested the bWAR almost all of MLB players for a full season of play last year. He is still 2.0 bWAR away from cracking the BBR All-Time single season leaderboard, which begins at 8.3 and good for a huge tie at 492nd place. And right now, his 6.3 fWAR is better than 10 entire teams...........
Remember Mookie Betts is the REAL AL MVP? Yeah, now that is so last month. It’s Trout, and “it’s not even close”..........It helps that Betts got hurt. It helps that Betts has slumped badly since coming back. And it helps that Trout is blowing up Baseball like he found some hitherto unknown cheat codes..........
Paul Goldschmidt wants his kid to wear a Trout jersey. So I am sending him one..........
A Little Bit Of Angels News
#1 pick Jordyn Adams has been signed. About $700K over slot, but he votes In-N-Out a 7 out of 10 and still rates it below 5 Guys so I refuse to feel sorry for him...........Maybe his new friend Jeremiah Jackson can straighten him out..........3rd rounder Aaron Hernandez has also signed. About $60K below slot...........I need to find a round up of all the singing status of our complete list of 2018 picks. Oh, HERE it is. Thanks!..........
Grant Brisbee needs to be informed of the sacred burial ground curse. It’s the only way to explain our results............
How about a reality check on our farm system, by an anonymous scout of unknown expertise and success..........
Jeff Katofsky, owner of the Orem Owlz franchise, has announced plans to relocate out of Orem and over to Pueblo, Colorado. It’s for a good cause. Katofsky wants to expand his world of baseball to include youth development, including underprivileged and special needs kids. Pueblo is joining up where Orem never did. Orem is where Kevin Maitan is starting his Halo career. He went 2 for 5 with an RBI on Monday And then 3 for 4 last night. He is batting .435.............
Everywhere In Baseball
The Yankees are hitting a lot of home runs. That was expected. Not as many as originally expected because they were grossly under-performing a few weeks ago, but still they lead all of MLB,. What might surprise you, however, is that in all of MLB the utterly decimated and under-performing Angels are 4th in HR, and only 16 behind the Yankees as I type this...........
This is good, UniWatch. This is very good. Umpire Ejection reports. Some of that stuff is liquid gold..........
The National League is winning more against American League teams, maybe because the AL is ahead of the NL in tanking? They got the Reds and Marlins, while we have nearly the entire AL Central..........
Now that I have gotten the chance to learn the minute details behind WHY that Terry Collins/Tom Hallion video was removed from the Internet, I have the solution. Since the agreement between MLB the umpire union states that “all audio from umpire microphones that are not aired during the telecast are to be deleted immediately after the game”, let’s help market the game and start airing all audio from umpire microphones! Games would be so much more fun and informative..........
Blowing up ballparks. The physics is fun. The videos are funner..........
The Giants and Marlins will, I predict, have a long and memorable beanball war for us to monitor going forward.....And throwing a baseball at a batter is respect, but throwing a bat is disrespectful? Got it.....You would think that this might get a Joe Torre on a plane to chat up the managers and execs of both sides? Nah. Torre reserves his throwing of weight around for the players..........
Rob Manfred’s pace-of-play science lab down in the Minor Leagues just took a shit all over the Connecticut Tigers. Unintended side-effects and all that..........
Mississippi is about to launch their sports betting era. It will be confined to their existing casino industry. I link to this, however, only for a paragraph that comes right at the end. This one: “ ‘We have smaller budgets, play in smaller stadiums, and do not pay our players and umpires Major League-sized contracts,’ wrote representatives of Mississippi’s two minor league baseball teams, the Biloxi Shuckers and Mississippi Braves. ‘Our game is more vulnerable to the risks associated with increased sports betting’ “. This, boys and girls, is what constitutes lies and half-truths and spin. Because, you see, Minor League franchises such as the Biloxi Shuckers and Mississippi Braves are affiliates of MLB teams. And it’s the MLB teams that pay the their players. MiLB fear-mongers are counting on state legislators and the public not knowing that..........
Buck Showalter surprised me. He is part of a Front Office program at Baltimore that teaches Analytics for Dummies, targeting his older, grizzly, veterans. Pretty cool. At the end, thogh, he says this: “Let’s face it. Guys come out of college football and they go right to the NFL and are all-pro. They come out of high school and play in the NBA. They come out of Stanford and are on the Ryder Cup in golf. Baseball? Doesn’t happen.” Uh, Buck, yes it does. It does happen. We here in Anaheim call it Trout..........
In the CWS, Oregon State blew their game against North Carolina wide open with 8 runs in the 8th and 9th and ran away in their elimination game 11-6. North Carolina goes home, and Oregon Sate faces off against Mississippi State on Friday. Oh, and next year’s CWS is now set to open with a regular-season MLB game between the Tigers and Royals..........
Don’t mess with Trevor Bauer. At least, don’t mess with him on the Internet. The dude is dialed in..........
Disney has countered Comcast, and now leads for the FOX buyout. It looks like Disney is the winner, but it also looks like Comcast jumping in cost Disney $20 billion that it would not otherwise have had to lose. So, maybe in a longer game, Comcast won?..........
The Duffle Bag
But...but...but WINS, man!............This Mississippi State fan wins the South............Javier Baez with one heads up DP..........Hey, at least when an LAA player gets injured and hit the DL it’s not due to an embarrassing reason............Jason Heyward with an absolute cannon shot. That’s Roberto Clemente territory, right there...........I’d like to laugh at MLB typos, too, but I make enough of ‘em myself..........