Mike Trout may be the greatest baseball player of all time. Now, he’s signed a contract making him the richest athlete ever. And hardly anyone even knows who he is. Our generation’s Mickey Mantle is going to play his whole career in total obscurity.
If you’re an Angels fan, surely, a lot. But how many Angels fans do you even know? And the rest of us rarely come across Trout at all. We might see him when he comes into town to play our team. But otherwise? His games don’t usually start until 10 p.m. ET. The All-Star Game gets worse ratings every year. Despite all his dominance, his team has only made the playoffs once, way back in 2014, and it lost all three games it played. The Angels, a middling team outside of Trout, are rarely featured in national television broadcasts. Mike Trout plays baseball like no one has ever played it, and the odds are excellent that most of you have seen him play once, maybe twice. Is that because of Mike Trout? Is that because of baseball? Is that because he plays in Anaheim? This is a question baseball needs to figure out. And quick.
This morning, ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the biggest news in baseball all year, reporting that the Angels and Trout were near an agreement to keep him with the Angels, essentially, for the rest of his career. The price was steep: $430 million, the largest contract in professional sports history and an amount that’s crazy high and still probably a steal for the team — even if it will be paid over 12 years, assuring he’ll be with the Angels until he is 39 years old.
