Appreciation

Mike Trout introduced himself to Angels fans at the 2010 Futures Game. In his first performance at Angel Stadium, his magic was on display: beating out an infield single, turning a routine single into a double on sheer hustle, forcing two errors with his speed on ground balls that could have been scored as hits.

He was not selected the most valuable player of the game. Fifteen years later, does he remember who was?

He thought about it for a second. Then his eyes lit up.

“Hank Conger,” Trout said.

The Angels had drafted both in the first round: Conger, a catcher, in 2006; Trout, an outfielder, in 2009. Before the 2010 season, Baseball America ranked Conger as the 84th best prospect in baseball, Trout as the 85th.

Of the 29 position players in the 2010 Futures Game, Trout is the only one still playing. Conger, now a coach for the Minnesota Twins, last played in the major leagues nine years ago.

In 2012, when he and Trout each started the season at triple-A Salt Lake, Conger realized there were top prospects, and then there was Trout.

Trout was 20. He played 20 games, batted .403, and the Angels summoned him to the major leagues for good.

“He goes off, gets called up, misses almost a month,” Conger said, “and still becomes the rookie of the year.”

That vote was unanimous. Trout also finished a close second for American League MVP to Miguel Cabrera, who won the Triple Crown. He went on to win three MVP awards — only Barry Bonds has won more — and finish in the top five in MVP voting every year for nine consecutive years.

On Saturday night, Trout hit his 400th home run, a milestone the oft-laconic Trout readily put into perspective.

“Definitely one to sit on, just to look back and reflect how quick it’s gone,” he said last month. “It seems like yesterday I just got drafted. Now I have two kids, and I’ve been here 14 years.”

Trout is 34, deep into the second half of his major league days. The mere mention of his name commonly triggers twin laments from fans: how injuries have hampered his career, and how the Angels have hampered his career.

In the first nine seasons of his career, the Angels put Trout on the injured list twice. In the five seasons since, this one included, the Angels put Trout on the injured list six times. He has not played 130 games in a season since 2019.

“Is this our modern-day version of Mickey Mantle?” asked Tim Salmon, who ranks second on the Angels’ all-time home run list at 299. “They talk about Mickey Mantle: if he didn’t blow out his knee, what could he have been? Are we going to look back on Trout’s career and say the same things?

“He’s obviously a Hall of Famer in so many ways already, but will he get the typical benchmarks? Will he be in that category like (former Angels teammate Albert) Pujols? He could have been.”

If Trout had played as often since the pandemic as he did before it, he already would have topped 500 home runs.

He still hits for power. He still gets on base, tied for third in the AL in walks. He hits the ball hard, when he hits it.

However, of the 144 major leaguers with enough at-bats to qualify for a batting title, Trout has struck out the second-most (.320 strikeout percentage). After hitting his 398th home run on Aug. 7, he did not hit his 399th until Sept. 11.

With 400 home runs, Trout ranks among the top 60 all-time. Dan Szymborski of Fangraphs projects Trout will finish his career with 503 home runs. That would get Trout into the top 30.

With good health, Trout might well have gotten to 600. That could have put him into the top 10, ahead of Frank Robinson, looking up at the likes of Pujols, Ken Griffey Jr. and Willie Mays.

“I’ve always told myself everything happens for a reason,” Trout said. “I did everything I could to be on the field.

“If I look back, I can say, ‘It sucks I’ve been banged up,’ but I’m here now, and I’ve still got a lot of time left to enjoy.”

The first two names former Angels manager Joe Maddon dropped in a comparison with Trout: Bonds and Griffey.

“He’s just among the best athletes ever to play the game,” Maddon said. “He has strength and speed and agility and everything.

“If you’re going to scout the perfect player, it would be Mike Trout.”

Bonds did not win a World Series; the Angels denied him. Griffey did not play in a World Series.

No one denies their greatness. No one should discount Trout’s, no matter how interrupted his half-decade has been. He was the dominant player of the previous decade, all of it.

Joe Maddon, left, who was Mike Trout’s manager from 2020-22, said, “If you’re going to scout the perfect player, it would be Mike Trout.”

(Ashley Landis / Associated Press)

“He was the best player in the game for, what, eight, nine, 10 years?” Dodgers Hall-of-Famer-in-waiting Clayton Kershaw said. “We’re not just talking about being an all-star. It was unanimous.

“If you ever asked anybody who the best player was, they’d say Trout. It’s like right now with Shohei (Ohtani) or (Aaron) Judge. It’s pretty obvious that Trout was the best player back then, and it’s not like he’s bad right now.”

In 2018, amid questions about why baseball could not market its best player, commissioner Rob Manfred said the greatest obstacle in marketing Trout was Trout himself.

“Player marketing requires one thing for sure: the player,” Manfred said.

The Angels shot back with a scathing public rebuke of the commissioner and a hearty endorsement of Trout — crafted in part by owner Arte Moreno — that ended thusly: “We applaud him for prioritizing his personal values over commercial self-promotion. That is rare in today’s society and stands out as much as his extraordinary talent.”

The adult in the room was Trout, who followed the Angels’ statement with his own. It ended this way: “Everything is cool between the Commissioner and myself. End of story. I am ready to just play some baseball!”

The first two questions Conger always gets: You played with the Angels? What’s Mike Trout like?

Conger might not tell them about the group texts with long-ago teammates in which Trout still participates, or the random videos Trout sends, like the one of Conger breaking his bat and popping up. He will tell them about the one player that, even on a team with Pujols and Torii Hunter, got inundated with requests to go somewhere or meet someone or sign something.

“Seeing him do almost everything like that, with a smile and really making an effort, was the most impressive thing for me to see as a person,” Conger said.

“You hear the saying, ‘Don’t meet your heroes.’ He’s the complete opposite. I know he’s not outspoken or super flashy so people are like, ‘We need him to be more marketable.’ But, in this day and age, he is the role model citizen of what everybody should strive for in Major League Baseball.”

The private group chats with teammates past and present are what Trout is about, not commercial shoots or talk shows, not podcasts or YouTube channels. He’d rather be cheering on his Philadelphia Eagles.

“The story is, honestly, that he is who he is based on where he came from,” Maddon said. “He’s not been infiltrated by social media and any other new-age, new-wave method of expressing yourself.”

Trout came from Millville, N.J., a blue-collar town of not even 30,000 people, some 40 miles south of Philadelphia. His high school could have retired his uniform number, except that Trout returns to the school every year to present a jersey with his number — 1, of course — to the new team captain.

Salmon has spent his adult life around the Angels, as a player and broadcaster. Fans often press him for the scoop on Trout, he said, with some version of this line: “You guys share the same fishy last name, and he’s Mr. Angel just like you.”

Salmon would be a logical guy to ask. He chose “friendly” and “cordial” as adjectives to describe his relationship with Trout.

“Everybody expects me to know him,” Salmon said, “and I don’t, really.”

Said Kershaw: “I’ve always appreciated the way he goes about the game. There’s not a lot of flash. It’s just good baseball.”

The Angels have not played good baseball. Trout has played three postseason games, all 11 years ago, and the Angels lost them all. The Angels had Trout and Ohtani together on the roster for six years and never once managed a winning record.

That has led to a long, loud and frankly tiresome chorus of well-meaning fans across America crying to liberate Trout, so a great player could take the postseason stage. Come home and play for the Phillies! How about the Yankees? Demand a trade, at least!

“He’s never made a stink in a headline about being disgruntled,” Conger said.

“He’s never going to walk into Arte’s office and say, ‘Listen, we need to do better, what’s going on?’ ” Maddon said. “He wants to win, but he’s never going to influence or persuade anybody who is in charge, because that person is in charge, and his job is to be Mike Trout, the player.”

Even if Trout ever did ask to be traded, at this point Moreno might have to throw in $100 million or so to induce another team to assume the contract, and Moreno isn’t about to pay Trout to play elsewhere when the home fans still love him. And, really, should we not celebrate a star who honors his commitment rather than lobbies to escape it?

Trout has expressed measured frustration over the Angels’ poor performance, but loyalty is his north star. The Angels have treated him well, and he has returned the favor.

One year, the Angels gave every kid at their game a Trout T-shirt — every Sunday, all summer long.

Hank Conger, right, now a coach with the Minnesota Twins, played in the same Futures Game as Mike Trout in 2010 and last played in the majors in 2016.

(Matt Krohn / Associated Press)

He, not Salmon, is Mr. Angel now. I asked what being an Angel means to him.

“There’s a lot of teams that had a chance to get me, and a lot of teams passed on me,” Trout said. That draft was 16 years ago, and still it was the first thing he mentioned in his answer.

“The Angels took a chance on a kid from a little town in southern New Jersey. I enjoy putting the uniform on. I don’t take it for granted.

“They trusted me when they offered the deal — two of them.”

Trout twice passed up free agency to stay with the Angels. In 2014, three years before he could try free agency, the Angels guaranteed him $144.5 million. In 2019, two years before he could try free agency, they tore up the final years of the first big deal and guaranteed him a then-record $426.5 million through 2030.

Moreno celebrated that deal with more of a pep rally than a news conference, in front of a giddy gathering of fans, with Trout and his wife on a dais beneath an enormous red banner that said “LOYALTY,” with a halo adorning the A.

Tony Gwynn never won a World Series, but no one discounts his greatness, or his loyalty to the Padres. His statue, with the inscription “Mr. Padre,” looms beyond right field at Petco Park.

To the loyal and long-suffering fans of Orange County, Trout is their Gwynn.

The Angels have put up two statues at Angel Stadium: one in honor of founding owner Gene Autry, the other in memory of Michelle Carew, the daughter of Hall of Famer Rod Carew, who lost her life to leukemia at 18.

Trout has five years left on his contract. Even so: The first player in the history of a 65-year-old franchise to earn a ballpark statue is Mike Trout.

Times staff writer Jack Harris contributed to this column.

Where’s the line between sharing a culture and stealing it? In a globalised world, borrowing is easy – but honoring is harder. We explore everything from re-branded recipes to re-imagined identities. What’s at stake when heritage becomes a trend?

Presenter: Stefanie Dekker

Guests:
Fadi Kattan – Chef and author
Richie Richardson – Professor at Cornell University
Nikki Apostolou – Content creator

George Wendt, who will be famous as long as television is remembered as Norm from “Cheers,” died Tuesday. He passed in Los Angeles, where he lived, though the cities to which he is spiritually tied are Boston, where the show was set, and Chicago, where he was born and entered show business by way of Second City, and which he unofficially represented throughout his life, and which claimed him as one of its own. One of his last Facebook posts, earlier this month, as a Chicagoan educated by Jesuits, was, “pope leo XIV is a sout’ sider my friendts. his cassock size is 4XIV.”

Entering stage right, as the assembled cast shouted his name, Norm would launch his heavyset frame across the set to a corner stool where a glass of beer — draft, never bottled — would appear as he arrived. He was the quintessence of Regular Guy, a big friendly dog of a person, with some of the sadness that big, friendly dogs can carry.

“Cheers,” which ran for 11 seasons from 1982 to 1993 — Wendt appeared in every one of its 275 episodes — was a show about going where everybody knows your name but also, as in life and fiction, a place for people who had nowhere better to be, or nowhere else to go. Though Norm was nominally an accountant, and then a house painter, his real job was to sit and fence with John Ratzenberger‘s font-of-bad-information postman Cliff Clavin — they were one of the medium’s great double acts — and drink beer, and then another. His unpaid tab filled a binder. (“I never met a beer I didn’t drink,” quoth Norm, though there was never any suggestion of alcoholism, or even of drunkenness.)

But as a person with work troubles and a marriage that could get the better of him — Wendt’s own wife, Bernadette Birkett, supplied the voice for the off-screen Vera — he was also the vehicle for some of the show’s more dramatic, thoughtful passages. (That his service to the series was essential was borne out by six Emmy nominations.) Unlike some other “Cheers” regulars, there was no caricature in his character. His woes, and his pleasures, were everyday, and he played Norm straight, seriously, without affectation, so that one felt that the Wendt one might meet on the street would not be substantially different from the person onscreen.

Like many actors so completely identified with a part, Wendt, who spent six years with Second City, worked more than one might have imagined; there were dozens of appearances on the small and big screen across the years, including his own short-lived “The George Wendt Show,” which took off on public radio’s “Car Talk.”

After “Cheers,” he’s perhaps most associated with the recurring, Chicago-set “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Bill Swerski’s Superfans.” But he also did theater, including turns on Broadway as Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray,” as Yvan in Yasmina Reza’s “Art” and as Santa in the musical adaptation of “Elf.” There was “Twelve Angry Men,” with Richard Thomas in Washington, D.C., and he was Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” in Waterloo, Canada. In Bruce Graham’s “Funnyman,” at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre in 2015, he played a comic cast in a serious play, breaking out of typecasting.

We were connected on Facebook, where he regularly liked posts having to do with music and musicians; he was a fan, and sometimes a friend, of alternative and underground groups, and tributes to him from that quarter are quickly appearing. (When asked, he would often cite L.A.’s X, the Blasters and Los Lobos as among his favorites.) One of his own last posts was in memoriam of David Thomas, leader of the avant-garde Pere Ubu, twinned with “kindred spirit” Chicago Bears defensive tackle Steve McMichael, who died the same day.

Once, after he messaged me to compliment an appreciation — like this — I’d written about Tommy Smothers, I took the opportunity to ask, “Do I correctly remember seeing you at Raji’s a million years ago, probably for the Continental Drifters?” Raji’s, legendary within a small circle, was a dive club in a building long since gone on Hollywood Boulevard east of Vine Street; it wasn’t the Roxy, say, or other celebrity-friendly spots around town — or for that matter, anything like “Cheers,” except in that it served as a clubhouse for the regulars.

“Yep,” he replied. “Tough to get out like I used to, but please say hi if you see me around.” Sadly, I never did, and never will.