Mike Trout strikes me as the kind of guy who, if you did donuts on his lawn in an F-150, would say “hey, that’s OK, I was gonna re-seed next spring.” He’s gives off the impression of a guy who, if a cashier short-changed him, would assume his math was off. He’s someone who, I suspect, if you told him all about the worst problems facing the world, would frown and say, “well, that stuff’s pretty bad” and then ask you how your day went.
I don’t mean to imply that he’s passive or uncaring or un-curious about the greater world and its frequent rottenness, I’m just saying that he seems like he’s operating on a different plane. He’s like Dr. Manhattan. He’s mastered the world he inhabits with ease, but his concerns are really off on another plane you and I and other mortals won’t ever really be able to appreciate. As far as baseball is concerned, anyway, he’s God-level.
So when even he is getting on the “let’s all rip the Astros and Rob Manfred and everyone else” act, you know it’s out of hand. Here’s what the greatest baseball player in the whole dang universe had to say at Angels’ spring training today:“It’s sad for baseball. It’s tough. They cheated. I don’t agree with the punishments, the players not getting anything. It was a player-driven thing. It sucks, too, because guys’ careers have been affected. A lot of people lost jobs. It was tough . . . a lot of guys lost respect for some of the guys.
“Obviously the GM got fired and Hinch got fired,” Trout said of punishments for Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch. “But the players getting nothing, that’s definitely not right, for sure.”
Then Trout said something that sounded absolutely terrifying:
On the one hand, it’s already pretty un-fun for anyone who has to pitch to Trout, so him knowing what’s coming sounds sadistic. On the other hand, he already identifies pitches with so much more skill than any other ballplayer that one has to wonder if, comparatively speaking, he’d get as much of an advantage as everyone else. I mean, yeah, you could give Superman a machine gun, but I question whether it would make a huge difference all things considered.
Anyway, when even Mike Trout is ripping you, you know you messed up.
