Image credit: © Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images
The story begins with a Mike Trout home run. It’s the equivalent of leading a fairy tale with “once upon a time,” or centering a modern American novel around a writer with a devoted girlfriend/wife/family who can’t shake some mysterious sense of ennui until he meets a younger woman who’s too whimsical for her stodgy surroundings. The classics sell, after all.
And this one has sold 420 times: Trout rocking his weight back and forth in the box, eyes disinterested but still sharp, his frame still imposing. The catcher’s target is up but Ryne Nelson misses down instead, hurling 98 at the bottom of the zone but also directly at the center of the plate. Trout coils, peers at it for a third of a second, then snaps a swing that also just misses, catching the inside of the ball and sending it the opposite way. Corbin Carroll jogs after it but it lands a dozen feet beyond the wall. Chomping his gum, eyes unchanged, Trout rounds the bases, steps on the plate, and goes through his customary celebration rituals in the dugout.
On the cosmic scale, and even baseball’s, it’s a fairly meaningless moment. Though Trout’s homer tied the game at two, the ever-dependable Angels went on to drop the game 4-3. The future Hall of Famer is in the midst of a rough patch—he went into the game hitting .149/.286/.234 in June, which won’t jeopardize his bid for a 12th All-Star Game but does probably kill off any dreams of a 34-year-old Trout leading the league in WAR, like the good old days. Really, it was a moment that didn’t mean a thing. Which also meant that it existed for itself, unbound to other narratives and incentives, a hidden piece of content designed solely to enjoy. It was a small thing in an increasingly big world.
