Page 128

2014 Minnesota Gameday HQ Round 2

Trout is the rare Major League player who can do it all. The five-tool player who can run, throw, field, hit and hit with power. Other players fitting this rare description include 2013 NL MVP Andrew McCutchen of the Pirates, Milwaukee’s Carlos Gomez, Colorado’s Carlos Gonzalez and Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig, the Cuban sensation whose own rookie debut was nearly as sensational as that of Trout’s. Last season, nine players hit at least 20 home runs and stole 20 bases. Ten years earlier, in 2003, there were six. In 1993 there were 12, but all the way back in 1983 there were but five. So the five-tool player is rare indeed. Such early stardom could hardly have been predicted for Trout even after he was picked 25th player overall in the 2009 MLB Draft following his senior season at Millville High School in New Jersey. Greg Morhardt was the Angels’ area scout for the Northeast prior to that 2009 draft, and he followed Trout closely. In the Twins’ minor league system in the 1980s, Morhardt was a teammate of Mike’s father, Jeff, a pitcher. Jeff was also coaching Mike on the Millville baseball team, and father and son had many conversations with scouts like Morhardt. At the time, young Mike stood out on a baseball field because his build was more like that of a safety in football, which happened to be the same position he played on the gridiron. Tall, with a thick upper body and powerful legs, Trout was a physical specimen hardly ever seen on a baseball field. But he could do everything he wanted on the field, and he rose up the draft boards for so many teams. “In my scouting report, I wrote: ‘He’s going to make a lot of All-Star teams and he has a chance to be a Hall of Fame player,’” says Morhardt. “You can’t go much higher than that. “You might write that down about one, two or three times in a career out of one area.” Says Morhardt, now a national cross checker for the Angels. He says that the only other time he’d written about a player’s Hall of Fame potential was when he did so for Matt Harvey, when the future Mets All- Star was in high school. Morhardt also looked back at his own playing career, when he’d been a finalist for the 1984 U.S. Olympic team, to get a comparison for Trout as a high school player. That collection of baseball players included future All-Stars Barry Larkin, Will Clark, Mark McGwire and B.J. Surhoff. (Ed Note: Baseball was a demonstration sport during the 1984 Olympic Games and the U.S. would lose to Japan, 6-3.) “I remember what they were like at 18 or 19 years old, and Mikey at 17 was better than everybody,” says Morhardt. “Mike was faster and stronger than Barry Bonds. Will Clark, I never competed against anyone who competed as in your face harder than Will Clark did. He was a great hitter, tough in the clutch. Mikey was still technically better because he had speed, power, makeup. So I was comparing him to those types of players because those were the players I knew best. I’m looking at Mike at 17, and he was better than all of them. And they’re as good as our game gets.” In the annals of baseball history, it was only in the ’50s when players like Mantle, Willie Mays, and Henry Aaron showed the ability to hit One of the best five-tool players in the ‘80s, Eric Davis knows how the rare breed can dominate the game singlehandedly. McCutchen OTTO GREULE JR./GETTY IMAGES SPORT JOHN SOMMERS II/GETTY IMAGES SPORT


2014 Minnesota Gameday HQ Round 2
To see the actual publication please follow the link above