The best answer for every baseball question
Reply
Category Archives: Baseball
New embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels uncovered
I’ve added two photos to the Embarrassing Photos of Cole Hamels archive, so you might want to check them out. I did not include this one because it’s just not overwhelmingly embarrassing and I have standard to maintain, but it’s worth noting that Cole Hamels’ charitable gift to this elementary school apparently included an awesome new playground and garden as well as a giant mural of Cole Hamels:
The mural and the “I helped the Greater Good” slogan on Hamels’ t-shirt make the photo seem rather ominous, like it’s from a dystopian future ruled by Cole Hamels.
Jeff Francoeur makes reasonable baseball observation, invites gunfire
For me, you win as many damn games as you can, whenever you can. If that’s Stephen Strasburg throwing 200 innings, so what? Cole Hamels pitched 262 innings (at 25, in 2008) the year the Phillies won the World Series. You’re telling Strasburg that once you get to 180 innings, go ahead and enjoy October from the bench? Just shoot me.
It may be silly to react to Strasburg’s long-expected shutdown before it happens, but I’ve mentioned it on the podcast a couple of times and I might as well note it in print: If the Nationals make the playoffs and Stephen Strasburg is held out of the postseason due to a pre-set innings limit, they’re ferociously missing the point.
Even if you believe in the Verducci Effect, which is unproven and relies on selection bias, you must recognize that young pitching is fickle, all teams and especially teams built upon young pitching are subject to massive fluctuations in performance year after year, and there’s no definitive way to prevent pitcher injury. There’s no guarantee the Nats will make the playoffs next year or the year after that, and there’s no guarantee Strasburg will be healthy then even if they do, regardless of whether he’s shut down tomorrow. Why do you have Stephen Strasburg if not to help you win the World Series?
Jeff Francoeur has been wrong about many things in the past (i.e., “This pitch is clearly a fastball!”) but he’s spot on here.
Via BBTF.
But why?
If you are a conscious human and fan of Major League Baseball, you probably know by now that the Mets’ bullpen sucks. And if you are not a conscious human or fan of Major League Baseball, it’s extraordinarily unlikely you are reading this blog. And that’s good, because if you’re not ready to get nerdy with this, you’re probably not going to care for this post.
If you’re interested in what follows, you might want to open up the league-wide bullpen stats at Fangraphs and Baseball-reference to follow along.
The Mets’ bullpen has the worst ERA of any relief corps in baseball despite playing half their games in a park that favors pitchers. It sucks, and we’re past dismissing it as confirmation bias at this point. It sucked at the beginning of the year, it sucked in the middle of the year, and it sucks now.
It’s worth noting, at the very least, that the Mets’ relievers have not allowed the most runs or the most runs per game — a couple other bullpens have been more viciously victimized, at least statistically, by their defenses. And the Mets’ bullpen, as difficult as this may be to believe, falls (barely) outside of the league’s bottom five in save percentage. So there’s some evidence that it’s maybe not quite as bad as we think it is, at least relative to the league.
Still, by Fangraphs’ shutdown/meltdown stat, the Mets have the only bullpen in the Majors that can boast more meltdowns than shutdowns. Even if the Mets’ bullpen is not blowing saves at quite the rate of the Rockies’ or Brewers’, it is more often allowing close games to fall out of reach than it is keeping them close. That’s kind of crazy, considering how much baseball in general favors pitchers.
And any qualifications of the Mets’ bullpen suckitude could only be used to argue that it doesn’t suck quite so hard as a couple other team’s bullpens, and even those arguments would be tenuous at best. There’s just no doubt that the Mets’ bullpen sucks, only a million open-ended questions about why it sucks to this extent. So with that in mind, let’s look at some possible explanations.
Poor construction: As good as Sandy Alderson has been so far at maximizing the fringes of the Mets’ position-player roster, he has been just as bad at putting together competent bullpens. It’s a tiny two-year sample, obviously, but if Alderson is hailed here and elsewhere for his moves that pay off, he should be faulted for those that don’t even if they were difficult to foresee. The GM is ultimately responsible for the personnel on a team’s roster, and the personnel in the Mets’ bullpen have not proven adequate.
Still, who saw this coming before the season? That’s not a rhetorical question; I’d love to see the reasonably argued column or blog post predicting that the Mets’ bullpen would be anywhere below capable. Multiple members of the group — notably Frank Francisco, Ramon Ramirez and Manny Acosta — have pitched way worse than their historical norms. Only Bobby Parnell and Jon Rauch have pitched better than their established levels, and only marginally so — not nearly enough to make up for the difference in their teammates’ performances.
A case could be made that the Mets entered the season relying on too many old relievers. Perhaps, given the sample sizes in which relief pitchers operate, by the time a guy can establish a level of production he is too old to maintain it. None of the best bullpens in the league include nearly so many pitchers on the long side of 30, and the Reds’ league-best bullpen has featured only one 30-plus pitcher all year.
But then, the Cubs, Cardinals and Astros all have bad bullpens with lots of young pitchers, and the few other big-league clubs that count on a handful of older relievers — the Blue Jays, Tigers, Angels and Giants — have all been OK. None have been great, which seems worth noting, but they’ve all been appreciably better than the Mets.
Plus, outside of Parnell, none of the young or youngish pitchers the Mets have tried in bullpen jobs has met with much success. There’s still hope for Josh Edgin based on his Major League peripherals, and some hope too for Pedro Beato, Elvin Ramirez and even Rob Carson based on their youth and Minor League numbers. But none of them was even an average Major League pitcher in their short big-league stints in 2012. You can’t just plug in young guys and assume they’ll be good, obviously. You need good young guys, and the Mets haven’t had many this year.
There’s no sure way to build a bullpen. It does seem like most great bullpens tend to be more reliant on arms developed in-house or acquired via trade than Major League free agents, but that’s certainly not a hard-and-fast rule. So while ultimately the blame for this bullpen must fall on Alderson’s shoulders, it’s hard to say with confidence that it’s all his fault.
They just suck: Well, maybe, but it’s hard to figure out exactly why. They walk a lot of guys, but not the most of any bullpen. They have a slightly below average strikeout rate. Their 1.47 WHIP is bad, but not as bad as the Cubs’ or Brewers’ (though both those bullpens are also bad).
The Mets are near the bottom in the league in zone percentage (pitches in the strike zone), and above only a couple of teams who generate a lot more swings-and-misses. So maybe there’s something there: They don’t fool enough hitters to get away with throwing so few strikes. But they are near the middle of the pack in line-drive rate and contact rate and in the low-middle range in home runs per fly ball.
There are a bunch of pitchFX and batted-ball numbers to show that the Mets’ relievers are underwhelming, for sure, but there’s none that really jumps out as an explanation for why they’re collectively so bad. At least by my understanding — if you’ve got something more definitive, please jump in and say something. I’m hardly an expert on this stuff.
Mismanagement: Early in the season, when the Mets were leading the league in relief appearances by a pretty wide margin, I was eager to pin the struggles on Terry Collins’ quick trigger. But as the Mets’ relievers have continued to struggle, Collins has reined in their use. They’re now merely sixth in the league in appearances, which seems rather remarkable given how often they need to be pulled for ineffectiveness. And the Mets are in the bottom half of the league in relief innings pitched and around the middle of the pack in pitches thrown. They’re sixth in appearances with zero days rest, but they’re below the Rays and Braves in that stat, and those teams have good bullpens.
At times, it has seemed like Terry Collins hasn’t helped things with constant reliance on platoon matchups and established bullpen roles, with some “dry-humping” to boot. But it doesn’t seem like any aspect of Collins’ management has been particularly egregious when you consider the performance of the men he has been charged with using.
Bad luck: There’s some evidence the Mets’ relievers have been unlucky this year. If you subscribe to DIPS theory, you might care to learn that they’ve got the biggest positive differential between their ERA and FIP of any team in the Majors — suggesting they’ve been better than their results and should in time meet with more success. Of course, they’ve combined for 319 2/3 innings this season, and though random fluctuations can play out over more time than that, it’s a reasonably large sample of collective sucking.
At 64.8 percent, the Mets also have the lowest strand rate (LOB%) in baseball, a stat that tends to normalize to around the league-average 72 percent. Part of that is likely because they don’t strike out a ton of hitters, but part of that is almost certainly bad luck. Fortune and randomness make for some of the least satisfying explanations for baseball phenomena, but they’re also very often the best ones. The Mets’ bullpen certainly hasn’t been good, but they haven’t been very lucky either.
Bad coaching: The Mets canned Jon DeBus as bullpen coach after one year last season and replaced him with Ricky Bones, but obviously neither has enjoyed much credit for their role. I have no idea to what extent a bullpen coach might help or hurt a bullpen, though — maybe they’re both really bad at pep talks or something, or they have terrible phone manners that somehow bother Terry Collins enough to make him antagonize his relief pitchers into being awful. That doesn’t seem likely, but hey.
Dan Warthen is the constant, and a constant bugaboo for Mets fans. I’d guess this season’s bullpen will cost Warthen his job, but I might have guessed that in 2008 or in 2011 and it hasn’t happened yet. Personally, I doubt Warthen’s coaching is what ails the Mets; the starting pitchers, after all, have been mostly very good when healthy this year. But since I can’t say for sure what effect a pitching coach has on a staff, I also can’t say if Warthen is good or bad at it.
Bullpen-wide malaise: If I’m trying my best to consider all the tangible explanations than I must consider the intangible ones as well. Maybe the Mets’ bullpen features awful chemistry or a defeatist attitude or some sort of bullpen-wide lack of accountability. Maybe they hate the starters and position players and want them to suffer. I don’t know. All of them seem like decent-enough dudes individually, and they’ve all pitched in better bullpens in the past. But maybe they lack a goofy vocal leader to rile them into effectiveness or something. I doubt it, but, again, hey.
So there’s no clear answer. I’m guessing the Mets’ bullpen has struggled due to a combination of nearly every factor above, with the possible exception of the last two. But then if I could say for sure what’s wrong with them, presumably someone in the team’s front office could too and he or she could get about fixing it.
There’s a lot of chicken-and-eggery here, but eight of the teams with the top 10 bullpen ERAs this season are in the thick of playoff contention, with only the otherwise-flawed Royals and Padres featuring good bullpens and bad teams. The good news is there’s enough randomness and fluctuation in bullpen performance and construction that we can legitimately hope the Mets’ bullpen is better next year, and that it’s good enough to help the team compete all season. The bad news is there aren’t a hell of a lot of guys in house who look certain to be part of that bullpen, so Sandy Alderson’s got a lot of work to do this offseason, and he hasn’t been great at building bullpens so far.
Friday Q&A pt. 1: Mets stuff
https://twitter.com/ryankelly/status/233920887181701120
Well I’m not going to tell you what to do; like him all you want. For me? No, I’ll never like Chipper Jones. I kind of love him, I think, in some bizarre Freudian way, but I hate his guts. He’s obviously an awesome player and he does some hilarious things — many of which seem aimed at straight-up trolling Mets fans, which I appreciate because I do the same thing sometimes. I’m hoping to write more on this at a later date so I don’t want to scoop myself, but one of the few downsides to this job is it changes the way you are as a fan. Actually, I’m not even sure it’s a downside — it’s just a thing. I’m not the same Mets fan I was six years ago.
My first day with a credential, I went into the Phillies clubhouse after Jimmy Rollins booted a ball that cost Philadelphia the game. Because I hated Jimmy Rollins, I figured, subconsciously, that he’d act like a jerk and prove himself worthy of my hatred. But it turns out Rollins is a disarmingly nice guy.
I’ve never met Larry Jones and he’s pretty much the last Major Leaguer that I actually hate, and I feel like I owe it to my teenage Mets-fan self to hold on to that forever. I’m sure he’s not a bad guy, but he’s the bad guy.
https://twitter.com/RobvanEyndhoven/status/233920066733895682
I see no rush. Duda will be back in September, no doubt, but it’s now clear the Mets aren’t going anywhere this year. Duda’s probably the best offensive option the Mets have for regular play in left, but if the team is actually concerned about his confidence, he might as well get the opportunity to gain it back by feasting on Triple-A pitching for a couple of weeks.
Of course, I’m less certain that’s the issue. The biggest concern surrounding Duda has to be his defense, as it seems pretty clear he’s not going to be a big-league right fielder anytime soon. Since Ike Davis appears entrenched at first — and also probably not rangy enough to play the outfield, for those wondering — Duda needs to play left field until he proves he can’t. I don’t see why he’d have anything close to adequate range in left if he didn’t in right, but maybe he’d at least be better equipped to cover it with his arm in left.
https://twitter.com/GSchif/status/233926888907735040
I assume it’s Colbert, phonetically, because he’s a total Colbert. Also, someone needs to make a weekly Cole Hamels news show called the Colbert Report, sounding out the t’s.
https://twitter.com/JoeBacci/status/233925241389330433
I had heard that, yes. I’m not much of a soccer fan. I don’t want to get into the reasons and start some sort of pro vs. anti-soccer comments section flame war like it’s 2006, but neither the sport itself nor the culture surrounding it really appeal to me. I like the one Italian guy who looks like he’s from the future.
But I would welcome the idea of a soccer team in Flushing if it meant, ultimately, that there’d be more things to do before and after Mets games. This is a purely selfish thing, not an eminent domain thing or a Wilpon thing or anything else: The Willets Point development can’t happen soon enough. I’ve been to most of the Major League ballparks in the country, and I can’t think of any that sit in aesthetically worse immediate areas than Citi Field does. The whole baseball experience would (and hopefully will) be more pleasant if the Iron Triangle were anything but rows upon rows of chop shops. Even if it’s totally corporate and cookie-cuttery, it’d still be nice to have someplace to go within quick walking distance of the stadium and the subway besides the one bar attached to the stadium.
Stickball stuff
Adam Doster’s excellent post to the Classical about Chicago’s regional variety of softball got me thinking about the regional baseball-related game popular in my neighborhood growing up.
Throughout high school and college summers, my friends and I played hundreds of stickball games. Some summers, before stuff like jobs and girlfriends got in the way, it seemed like we played nearly every day. We played other sports too, of course — basketball sometimes and pickup tackle football pretty often. But those typically required more guys or more effort than stickball, our default outdoor activity.
There’s some stuff on the Wikipedia about stickball, but it includes descriptions of varieties we never played. Our version is what the Wiki deems “fast-pitch stickball,” requiring a spray-painted strike zone on the side of a school building. We played with a wooden stickball bat — available at the local sporting-good store — and a tennis ball. The balls and strikes rules are the same as regular baseball, with no limit on foul balls or foul tips.
Because games were typically 3-on-3, 2-on-2 or even 1-on-1 in lean times, there was no baserunning. Ground balls fielded cleanly by the pitcher were outs, as were any fly balls caught by a fielder. Ground balls past the pitcher were singles, and doubles, triples and home runs were distinguished by predetermined landmarks at each field. At the place we most frequently played, my old elementary school, doubles were anything on the gravel area built around the playground, triples were past the playground, and home runs — which were more or less impossible — were past the soccer goal on the field behind the playground.
The game emphasized the pitcher-batter matchup, even more so than real baseball. Plus if it’s a 2-on-2 or 3-on-3 game, you get to hit and pitch much more often than you do in a regular 9-on-9 baseball game.
Most of the time, I played with the same rotating group of 8-10 guys, so we developed pretty keen scouting reports on each other. One guy, who was the best pitcher on our high-school’s baseball team and could touch 90 with his fastball, was the only one capable of intimidating hitters with a tennis ball. One guy threw a sneaky curveball on both sides of the plate. Another guy had great control but reliably threw first-pitch fastballs down the middle that you could sit on. I honestly don’t want to get into more detail even now for fear I’ll give something away for some future game, even though we haven’t played in eight years or so. As recently as a few weeks ago at a bachelor party, several of us were sharing notes on the guys that weren’t around.
I sucked at pitching, relying on a crappy slider and a loopy curveball that often got too much plate. But I developed into a decent wrist hitter with a good eye, the best way to succeed in stickball. Also, because the strike zone was painted in the crook of the L-shaped elementary school field and everything that hit the side wall was foul, pulling the ball provided no benefit.
And something funny happened. I quit baseball after Little League because I wasn’t very good and took up lacrosse for a while because physically violent sports better suited my body type and mentality and because it seemed like a better way to stay in shape for football. I played stickball religiously, but didn’t try baseball again until I joined an 18-and-under travel team with some friends. By then — and I am sure it was because of stickball — I could hit a bit, leading the team in OBP and finishing second in batting average. I am sure it was because of stickball because I hit almost everything right back up the middle — either a groundout to the pitcher, a single through the hole, a fly out to the center fielder or an extra-base hit over his head. I’ve been playing baseball in Brooklyn for six years now, and it took me at least the first two to start pulling the ball with any regularity. Also, I still want to play stickball, almost always. Old habits die hard.
Notable area stickball alumni include Taking Back Sunday drummer Mark O’Connell and ESPN host Kevin Connors.
Everything even resembling baseball is pretty awesome. What version did you play?
The only thing we have to Fiers
The very first thing that statistical analysis shows us is there is a whole lot of randomness involved in every single baseball outcome. Predictions based on statistics are merely suggesting the most likely outcome. Not even Colin Wyers of Baseball Prospectus is so soulless as to not appreciate when something unlikely and random occurs during baseball. If anything, a basic understanding of statistical likelihood, enhances one’s enjoyment of short hops, fielding flubs and unexpected performances.
And this is why Mike Fiers is the most enjoyable story in baseball right now.
– Dustin Parkes, Getting Blanked.
Good read from Parkes on Fiers, the Brewers’ 27-year-old rookie sensation. I especially like the excerpted part because it reiterates something I’ve argued many times before: Understanding baseball’s probabilities fosters a greater appreciation for both the unlikeliest and likeliest outcomes. It’s beautiful when Jeff Francoeur plays like a superstar for a few months and then it’s beautiful when he regresses to his career norms. Baseball is the best.
As for Fiers: Certainly no one could have predicted this level of success in his first go around the big leagues, but his Minor League stats were pretty good. He was old for every level, but his career Minor League strikeout-to-walk ratio is over 4 and he seemed to suppress hits pretty effectively. Maybe his stuff doesn’t look like a typical Major Leaguer’s, but then maybe there’s some selection bias there.
From the Wikipedia: Pud Galvin
I’ll never not be entertained by old-timey baseball stuff.
From the Wikipedia: Pud Galvin
James Francis Galvin was born on Christmas day of 1856 in St. Louis, Missouri. He grew up in an Irish neighborhood called Kerry Patch and trained as a steamfitter, but by the age of 18 he was pitching for the St. Louis Brown Stockings in the National Association, playing something similar to modern baseball but featuring almost no offense. No one on the 1875 Brown Stockings sported an OPS over .550 besides Lip Pike, who was utterly awesome for his time.
According to this Wikipedia-endorsed bio (from which I’m getting most of this information), Galvin was “uneducated and unrefined,” and as a teenager he exclusively wore flannel shirts and ate with his hands. That sounds a lot like me as a teenager, but I thought I was pretty refined.
Galvin played independent ball in 1876, then played one year for Buffalo of the International Association in 1877, then surfaced in the Majors for good as a 22-year-old when the Buffalo Bisons joined the National League in 1879. Galvin purportedly earned the nickname “Pud” because he made hitters look like pudding. Known as a gentleman, he was also called “Gentle Jeems.” And for his durability (detailed in the next paragraph), the 5-8, 190-pound Galvin was called “The Little Steam Engine.”
From 1879-1884, Galvin averaged 504 innings a season, starting nearly 70 percent of Buffalo’s games in that stretch and throwing 317 complete games, culminating in back-to-back years of more than 600 innings and 70 complete games in 1883 and 1884. He was pretty good, too, notching a 114 ERA+ and a 4.62 strikeout to walk ratio over his first six seasons as a full-time Major Leaguer. At one point he started 22 straight games and completed all of them. Galvin’s 1884 campaign, in which he went 46-29 with a 1.99 ERA over 636 1/3 innings, produced the highest single-season pitcher WAR in baseball history, though Galvin was so atrocious with the bat that his offense cost his team about 1.9 wins.
In Buffalo, Galvin became lifelong friends with fellow mustache man and future president Grover Cleveland.
A lot of this isn’t from the Wikipedia, by the way. Feel free to add it.
Another thing that’s not on the Wikipedia is that Galvin and most of his teammates probably sucked, at least by contemporary standards. The game was obviously massively different then — there was no pitcher’s mound yet, for one thing, plus the distance from the mound to home plate changed multiple times during Galvin’s career, Galvin never saw the need for a curveball, and he threw underhand. But take a look at the work Patrick Flood put together here. If fielding percentage is a decent indicator of the level of play, the way it increased over 100 points from 1871 to 1901 suggests the game was rapidly (and not surprisingly) developing and improving, presumably due to increased exposure and a broader talent pool, plus more time to figure out what the hell to do on a baseball field.
Which brings me to an important question, and something I think about pretty frequently: At what level could Galvin and his teammates from 1884 reasonably compete today if they could time-travel here and have modern equipment (but not modern training, since that throws everything off)? The league’s .899 fielding percentage, if we’re using that method, suggests the level wasn’t any better than a typical high school league today. Obviously the fielding stats are subject to the whims of subjective scoring and shoddy groundskeeping, but then so is high-school ball.
In other words, if I crewed up with some bros to form a competent but by no means good amateur team of adults in 2012, how far back in time would we have to travel to be able to compete with Major Leaguers? I bet it’s sometime around the 1880s, or maybe a little later if my friend Bill comes. Bill can throw really hard.
Back to Galvin: He was traded to the Pittsburgh Alleghenys in 1885 and ate innings for them until 1889. That season, incidentally, Galvin openly used the Brown-Séquard elixir, a supposed performance-enhancer made by draining monkey testicles. At the time, the Washington Post reported:
If there still be doubting Thomases who concede no virtue of the elixir, they are respectfully referred to Galvin’s record in yesterday’s Boston-Pittsburgh game. It is the best proof yet furnished of the value of the discovery.
In 1890, Galvin left the National League for the uncreatively but somewhat deliciously named Pittsburgh Burghers. The Burghers played in the newly formed Players’ League, which was presumably named after the football pool Lenny Dykstra keeps asking you to join. The Players’ League was formed by the Brotherhood of Professional Base-Ball Players over a spat with the National League owners, but it folded after one season and ultimately hurt the players’ standing, as it led to the demise of the American Association and more leverage for National League owners.
Galvin returned to the NL’s Pittsburgh franchise in 1891, the first year in which it was called the Pirates. He was traded to the Browns midway through the 1892 , but suffered a leg injury in a collision with Cap Anson and retired later that year. He attempted to hang on as an umpire in 1893, but did not take criticism well.
Galvin died broke and fat in Pittsburgh in 1902 after several failed business ventures. To date and for the foreseeable future, he ranks second in innings pitched and complete games in Major League history. He was the first pitcher to win 300 games, the first to throw a no-hitter on the road, and presumably the first to advocate monkey testosterone.
How this happens
But with Bay inching closer to the Citi Field exit, here’s what likely happens next. He finishes this season in his new part-time role and then returns for spring training next year (for those screaming trade, don’t waste your breath).
At that point, Bay will have roughly a month to prove he can be a productive piece in the Mets’ lineup. That should provide Bay the opportunity to show he can do more than slap grounders to the left side of the infield or strike out, his signature contributions of the past two seasons.
But if that trend continues, and there appears to be no bottom to Bay’s spiral, the solution is unavoidable. He’ll have to be released before Opening Day, with the Mets picking up the remaining $19 million on his tab — $16 million salary, $3 million buyout of his 2014 option.
That sounds spot-on to me. Much was made yesterday of Sandy Alderson saying that the team would not eat Jason Bay’s contract, but what would anyone expect him to say? “Yeah, actually I’m quite sick of seeing him ground out weakly to the shortstop and can’t wait to cut him loose, $19 million be damned.”
Alderson keeps it tight, as he should. Here’s what I said in June:
The Mets will and should give Bay every chance to make good on his contract. Since it hasn’t happened yet and the injuries are piling up, it doesn’t seem likely to happen. And this front office doesn’t seem prone to carrying players that can’t pull their weight just because they’re paying them. I’d guess Bay comes to Spring Training, we read a couple stories about how he’s in the best shape of his life, and the Mets keep him around while the roster picture clears up. If no one gets hurt and he isn’t 2009 (or even 2010) Jason Bay again, they cut him loose late or send him packing in a Gary Matthews Jr.-style deal, provided he’s willing to waive his no-trade clause.
I’m sticking to that story. I’ll add that I expect some segment of the Mets’ fanbase to fret like hell over the possibility of Bay making the team out of the gate in 2013 over some better or younger player, just as some did in 2010 with Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo. Unless Scott Hairston leaves in free agency and the Mets can’t find any other righty- or switch-hitting outfielder who’s anything close to a Major Leaguer or Bay shows up to camp magically and legitimately rejuvenated, it’s hard to see how he fits on a big-league roster.
Awesome Mike Trout turns 21 awesomely
Angels outfielder Mike Trout turns 21 today. Mike Trout is so ridiculously good at baseball. Look at Mike Trout doing stuff:
I’m curious what you think, though:
Tedquarters 