How the Angels caught Trout,
Angels star who went 25th shows Northeast can yield big-time talent
This will be Mike Trout’s fourth Major League Baseball All-Star Game. He turns 24 on Aug. 7.
He has finished second, second and first in the last three American League MVP votes. He routinely reaches statistical mileposts that no one except Joe DiMaggio has reached at such a tender age, and he has a chance to become the first player to lead either league in runs scored for four consecutive seasons.
He is the best player in baseball. But, six years ago, he was merely known as a very good right-handed-hitting high school outfielder from New Jersey. The latter is never supposed to become the former.
“I saw him at an event the fall of his senior year and didn’t really connect on who he was,” says Los Angeles Angels director of scouting Ric Wilson, who was a crosschecking scout at the time. “Then Eddie mentioned something about ‘Mike,’ and I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s the guy he’s been telling me about.’ ”
Eddie is Eddie Bane, who was the scouting director at the time and now is a senior adviser for the Boston Red Sox. Through much of 2008 and 2009, he spent considerable time on the other end of the phone from Greg Morhardt, who was an Angels area scout in the Northeast. Morhardt was, by far, Trout’s loudest advocate, telling Bane and Wilson that Trout would be a Hall of Fame player.
“We’d tease him,” Wilson says. “We’d say, ‘Greg, you say he’s the best player in the country. Well, it’s a pretty big country.’ ”
It’s not that anyone doubted Trout. On the contrary, he was projected by most people as a first-round pick. The Angels got him with the 25th selection.
But Northeastern players don’t have much of a window to convince scouts in the spring. Trout is from Millville, a town of 28,000 between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Baseball is not part of the soil there, and cold, windy spring days could make a scout feel he had wasted a trip.
“One day Eddie went to see him, and Mike didn’t do anything special,” Wilson says. “He called and told me that, but then he said, ‘I don’t know what “it” is. But he’s got “it.” ’”
Meanwhile, Billy Godwin was hoping Trout would keep the “it” to himself.
He was the coach at East Carolina. He had out recruited Coastal Carolina to get a commitment from Trout.
“He played in one tournament and went 2-for-25,” says Godwin, now a scout for the New York Yankees. “But I clocked him at 3.9 (seconds) going down the firstbase line. That’s how he got one of those hits, by beating out a grounder to the second baseman. The other hit was a grand slam.
“He weighs about 230 now, and he weighed about 190 then, but he was still physical. You didn’t know just what kind of hitter he would be. That’s always hard to judge, but you knew the speed was there. The other thing you knew is that he had the best makeup you could ever ask for. He absolutely loved playing baseball, no matter what kind of day he was having. You were drawn to that.”
Godwin had seen Trout at home, playing in front of friends and family, during his junior year. He made another trip during his senior year and saw rows of scouts with their briefcases and stopwatches, and he saw Trout get three hits.
“I said, ‘We’re not getting him,’ ” Godwin says.
R.J. Harrison, the scouting director for the Tampa Bay Rays, knows the hit-or-miss nature of the scouting business.
“Sometimes the most important thing is the thing that you don’t see,” Harrison says. “How hard will the player work to be what he can be? How will he handle adversity? I see Paul Goldschmidt having great years for Arizona. ... People knew about him, but he was a right-handedhitting college first baseman. You see a lot of those, but he had that special drive inside him, just like Trout.
“But the thing about the Northeastern player is that you usually have to see him in the summer.