Mike Trout may be the greatest baseball player of all time. Now, he\u2019s signed a contract making him the richest athlete ever. And hardly anyone even knows who he is. Our generation\u2019s Mickey Mantle is going to play his whole career in total obscurity.<\/b>
\nIf you\u2019re 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s crazy high and still probably a steal for the team \u2014 even if it will be paid over 12 years, assuring he\u2019ll be with the Angels until he is 39 years old. But while it\u2019s a great deal for Trout and for the Angels \u2014 who get to keep one of the best players in the history of the game in the same ugly uniform forever \u2014 the question has to be asked: Is Mike Trout staying his entire career in Anaheim good for baseball?
Staying in one low-profile place his whole career is definitely on-brand for Trout. He\u2019s a far more mild-mannered player than, say, Bryce Harper, the contemporary he came through the minors with, and the one Trout will always have (unfavorably) compared to him. He did not come into the league looking to upend any notions of what a superstar is; he\u2019s a traditional Unwritten Rules old-school type of player, and other than an amusing interest in weather patterns, he doesn\u2019t have any noteworthy personality traits at all. He\u2019s just an affably dull, monotonous, relentlessly straightforward person, which are the precise skills that make you a fantastic baseball player and concurrently a wet noodle of a multimedia superstar. Derek Jeter made this work, but it was a slightly different era for sports superstars, and he played for the Yankees, for Christ\u2019s sake. Trout is so nondescript a persona that his most prominent advertisement is for\u2026 Super Pretzel, in what has to be the saddest advertising campaign for an otherworldly baseball player ever.
Mike Trout, Soft-Pretzel Superstar. (h\/t @EWPod listener Todd, who saw this sad endorsement in the frozen-food aisle) pic.twitter.com\/UD0B093uIi
That\u2019s why staying in sleepy Anaheim \u2014 which, depending on whether or not Manny Machado can revitalize the Padres, might be the third-most-popular team in Southern California \u2014 is a perfect fit for Trout\u2026 but a missed opportunity for baseball. Had Trout hit the free-agent market in 2020, every high profile team \u2014 the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Cubs, the Dodgers, the Phillies, everybody \u2014 would have moved heaven and earth to get the New Jersey native, and all of them would have showcased him in every possible way. Had he played for the Yankees or Red Sox, you\u2019d have the game\u2019s best player, the guy who exemplifies everything baseball wants to be, the way the game is played at this current moment, essentially on television every weekend. But that\u2019s not what Trout wanted. He wanted to stay in Anaheim. He just wants to focus on baseball. That will continue to be all he has to do.
But you\u2019re not much more likely to watch him play baseball over the next seven years than you were over the past seven. The Angels might get a little better over this time \u2014 you\u2019d like to think Trout will someday get that first playoff win \u2014 but he\u2019s still going to be on the West Coast, on a team few care about, in a sport that\u2019s more popular than it\u2019s given credit for but is still primarily more massive regionally than it is nationally. If you want to watch baseball played at its highest level, which is the way Mike Trout plays, you\u2019re going to have to seek him out on your own. And we\u2019re seeing fewer people willing to do that. To put another way: If a Mike Trout breaks every record, but he\u2019s in a forest where no one is around to hear him, does he make a sound?<\/p>\n