In Mike Trout, MLB's past is prologue

KONNOR GRIFFIN, STILL in his uniform, sits down hard in a rolling chair at his locker, in the elbow of the Pittsburgh Pirates' clubhouse. It's a Thursday afternoon in mid-April, following a meeting of two middling teams in front of 28,243 empty seats, the kind of day baseball won't remember. But Griffin is 19. So he flips his hat into the stall, opens an app on his phone and starts watching reels. There he is, fielding the ground ball for a possible double play, but second baseman Brandon Lowe is too far from the bag. So Griffin sprints toward... He swipes up. Another video. Swipes again. Griffin again. He steps on second and spins as the Nationals' Nasim Nunez slides into him and fires toward... Swipe. Griffin is baseball's top prospect, supposedly the next Mike Trout, anointed even before the Pirates called him up to be their starting shortstop two weeks ago. He's so big, strong and fast -- so rare -- that, after five games, the team signed him to a massive extension. He's bent over now, elbows on knees. Teammates pass by in towels, glancing at the kid. Staffers and reporters stare, pretending they're not. Swipe, swipe. In the clip, Griffin tries to stop his throw to first but can't. The ball dribbles into right field, allowing three runners to score. Beauty and inexperience, grace and blunder, an instant apart. With a wall of cameras behind him, Griffin sets his phone in the stall and grabs his hat. He puts it back on and carefully adjusts the brim, shadowing a face that, other than eye black and a faint line near the crook of his left eye, has been blemished by neither sun nor time. A soft goatee, the kind seen in high school yearbooks, frames his jaw. "Just trying to make a play," he says. He apologizes to starting pitcher Braxton Ashcraft, who, overhearing this from the next stall, waits for the reporters to collect their video and sound before stepping over. Ashcraft leans down and drapes an arm across Griffin's back, saying something at a whisper. The kid nods, Ashcraft returns to his locker, and Griffin again reaches for his phone, on a shelf above a row of unworn cleats. Yellow and white, pristine, not even a scuff. THERE'S ONLY ONE way to know what it's like to be the next one. You go find the last one and ask. So in walks the actual Mike Trout, stepping carefully into the Angels' clubhouse. Tight black jeans, white button-up, designer sneakers with a tricolor flag. He's in a hurry, but then he sees the Pikachu doll in catcher Logan O'Hoppe's locker. A good luck charm? After being shut out in the series opener, the Angels unloaded last night and tonight. "I mean, 18 runs in two games," Trout says with a shrug. It's a little more than an hour before midnight in West Sacramento, a rail yard zone across the Sacramento River from the bustle of the California capital. The Athletics are playing at Sutter Health Park, home of the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats, while their $2 billion Las Vegas cathedral gets built. The stairwells are decorated with the jerseys of men who'd been legendary someplace else: Barry Zito, Mike Piazza, Tim Hudson, as good as almost anyone alive. Now they're reduced to numbered cloth under glass, just a memory of the times they were on a minor league stint and passed through. Trout is a man who stayed. Once, that meant promise. For a long time it meant greatness. Now it means something else, including enduring 11 consecutive losing seasons. For now that means a double locker wedged into a corner, next to a cinder-block wall, in a brick building near a rail yard that looks like a high school cafeteria from the outside. Trout's teammates were in the dugout and just celebrated tonight's win. Trout was in here, surrounded by televisions and the USA Today crossword and empty space. Three nights ago in Arizona, in the eighth inning of a blowout loss, Trout hit a soft grounder to third. Forever a hustle guy, emboldened by offseason speed drills and his best three-month stretch in years, he tore out of the batter's box toward first. But when he lunged for the bag, his hamstring clicked. He says it's minor. Just a cramp that didn't go away. But at 34, that sent him to the injured list for three weeks, right when he was playing like the man he used to be. Until you get close to him, Trout could still pass for a younger man. The same soft eyes, wide smile, high cheekbones as when he was a 19-year-old phenom. Just months after being called up, Trout grabbed a sport by the shoulders and sent an electric feeling through everyone who watched. He wears his cap backward, covering a V-shaped strip of hair on the back of his head. As a kid in New Jersey, he collected trading cards, but he stopped to become the best player in a generation. Earlier this season, Zach Neto, the Angels' 25-year-old shortstop, pulled a gem-mint Charizard from the second Pokémon pack he ever opened. And Trout, intrigued, couldn't just let the kid have it. So he dove back in. Now his locker at Angel Stadium is surrounded by a half-dozen metal card cases and stacks of top-loaders and unopened boxes, a veteran's office decorated with toys. "Passing time," he says. "Or you'll drive yourself crazy." Trout is one of the team's oldest players, and Kurt Suzuki, a teammate four years ago, is now the team's manager. There are lines next to Trout's eyes and a few gray hairs sprouting where his beard thickens on either side of his chin. And there's a strange new thing that lives in his body now, vibrating throughout the day but never worse than in the mornings. "Ache," he says. He hired a nutritionist last offseason, noticing that postgame junk food was going straight to his knees, and dropped 10 pounds. He stopped lifting heavy, opted for higher reps, started doing sprinting drills. He spent 30 minutes a day in a $159,000 acrylic chamber that emits red light and vibroacoustic sound waves and hydrogen molecules inhaled through the nose, made by a company that promises to slow the aging process. The company is called Ammortal, and Trout is an investor. Next to the team's weight room, he discusses it cheerfully, one suburban dad telling another about his new thing. Not bragging. Just explaining what it takes. Still, a few weeks before Trout's 35th birthday, teammates insist nothing has changed. "He's still that guy," says Wade Meckler, who, at age 12, lived 15 minutes from Angel Stadium and wore a Trout foam fish hat. Now at 26, Meckler hits behind him. "He's still the guy hitting the ball harder than anyone else in the cage. He's still the guy running 30 feet per second down the line." He isn't. But nobody who loves him will say so, least of all the man himself. This is his most productive year since 2022 -- 20 homers, 51 RBIs and 11 steals in 125 games -- but it'll never be enough, because Mike Trout will never again be what he was. He still walks more than almost anyone else. He's also batting .243. A half hour after the Angels' Sacramento win, he nods goodbye to teammates and clubhouse staff. Then he moves toward the exit, past washers already pulling the stains from the day, past storage carts and pitching machines and a snack room restocked by men living in temporary housing a few miles from here. Outside, two buses idle in the dark. The first will leave at 10:55 p.m., heading for the Kimpton Sawyer hotel across the Sacramento River, and 12 hours later, the same bus will haul players back to the stadium for another game. Trout is on his phone, on a video call with someone, as he ambles toward the bus. He steps up onto the first one, the glow from the screen lighting the inside for a moment, and takes a seat. I'M NOT SURE when my dad started feeling what he did about Mickey Mantle, but I do know he passed it down to me. I was 13 when The Mick died, and we didn't talk much about it. I just grew up knowing a ghost story, two images of the same man: a wunderkind running on a torn-up knee and an old man with a shredded liver doing the math on what might've been. During the 1951 World Series against the Giants, my dad was a baby. So he'd get the story the way it came to me, retold and smoothed from the handling. Mickey was a rookie in right field, a poor kid from an Oklahoma mining town, maybe the fastest thing the game had ever seen and a threat from either side of the plate. Joe DiMaggio was in center, and in the fifth inning of Game 2, Willie Mays sent a fly ball between them. Mantle went for it, the way he did everything, but Joe D called him off. Mickey hit the brakes, yielding as he'd been taught, but his spikes got hung on a rubber drain cover buried in the grass. He dropped, and everyone knew they'd witnessed something terrible. He was 19, and back then there were no surgeries to fix the damage. He played 17 more seasons on that knee, winning the Triple Crown and three MVPs. For the last 31 years I've wondered which of those ghosts was really haunting us: the kid who made us feel like we were watching godliness or the withering man he became. My dad and I didn't talk about that, either, because the promise of The Mick was always the same thing as the curse, that no matter where and what you come from, this could be you. BY THE TIME Konnor Griffin turned 20, his father, Kevin, had his game-day routine locked. He left the Renaissance hotel and walked the Roberto Clemente Bridge, crossing the Allegheny River. Then he took his seat at PNC Park and spent the next few hours watching Konnor play shortstop with the city skyline at his son's back. There are hundreds of bridges in Pittsburgh, and they have always played a strange role here. This is a place that makes things so other cities can show them off, steel forged and molded before being sent across one of those bridges to frame New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. The bones of a country were made by Yinzers, most of whom never got to see where they ended up or had much interest in thinking about it. The same was once true for ballplayers. Honus Wagner played most of his career here. Willie Stargell never left. But a while after that, the city started losing its greats instead of keeping them. Barry Bonds and Jose Bautista and Gerrit Cole, and on and on it has gone for decades. Ask anyone here, and it's a matter of time before ace starter Paul Skenes is gone. Doesn't matter how many bridges a city has, you don't name them after guys who leave and win. Clemente stayed, and for his 3,000 hits and four batting titles and dozen gold gloves, it was the staying that endeared him to locals. Even 53 years after his plane crashed near Puerto Rico, ending Clemente's life at 38, there's a museum and a park named for him. Kevin Griffin is 53, so Clemente or Mantle or Mays aren't memories for him. They're stories. Kevin is a member of the Bonds and Jose Canseco and Ken Griffey Jr. generation, old enough to remember their early years but young enough to know how we talk about them now. "Man," Kevin says. "I don't know that there's been anybody that did it at a higher level in my lifetime than Barry Bonds. Junior is definitely my favorite player to watch. But as far as the best? Griffey was hurt a lot, and Bonds was not." Griffey was great, in other words. Bonds found ways to stay great. When Konnor broke through in April, his father saw it as a culmination. The nexus point of so many decisions and moments, of colored whiffle balls loaded into a pitching gun and fired at his boy. A white ball meant swing, a red one take, a two-tone ball meant lay down a bunt. It takes at least 13 milliseconds for the human brain to register color, and damned if Konnor couldn't do it at least that fast. When Konnor was 12, a travel ball tournament kicked him out. Letting him play, the organizer told Kevin, was unfair to the other boys. Kevin is still proud of the way his son stayed in the dugout to cheer on his teammates. "We had to explain to him," Kevin says, "that sometimes adults are idiots and make ridiculous decisions. There's some things that we just have to live with." That's around the same time Jay Powell, a former MLB pitcher who played with Alex Rodriguez and Chipper Jones, told a reporter in Mississippi that Konnor was the best athlete he had ever been around. College recruiters started promising that, if Konnor committed today, he'd be in the starting lineup the moment he was eligible. A TV station called Konnor a "Phenom" when he was 15, and two years later, a national writer said Konnor had the "highest ceiling of anyone" in the 2024 draft class. Patience, the father told his son, and he'd been trying to teach him that for years. Seems like yesterday, Kevin says, that Konnor was 6 years old, sitting between his dad's legs in a deer stand. The rifle's nose on the sill, a buck emerging from between the trees. "Deep breaths," Kevin recalls telling his boy. "Crosshairs on the shoulder, and ..." It was the first in so many stands and so many mornings, moments that run together after so many years, that single inseparable season of a daddy and his boy together in the quiet and the cold. Kevin thinks about those moments from his seat watching the grown man playing shortstop for the Pirates. Konnor is 6-foot-3, 222 pounds, able to glide from here to there in a flash, stealing second or stretching a double into a triple, faster than a player that big ought to be. It was during spring training in 2025, Kevin says, that Mendy Lopez first said the comparison aloud. Konnor was in Class-A Bradenton, 18 years old. "I never saw Mike Trout when he was young," Lopez told a reporter months later, "but that's what this is." Kevin doesn't like that. "Konnor has done nothing," he says. "And you're comparing him to players who have had long, successful careers, and so I always felt like those comparisons were ridiculous. "But you can see some comparisons. You look at athleticism and arm strength and different things like that, but until you face major league pitching for a long period of time, I don't think it's even fair to Konnor to compare him." Pittsburgh can't wait around for that. Just days after Konnor became the first teenage position player to debut since Juan Soto, the Pirates announced that they'd extended his contract, reportedly adding nine years and $140 million to his deal. The kid was batting .176 at the time, four hits in his first five games. The decision wasn't about his numbers. The deal was an obstacle, just something between Konnor and all those bridges. Because it has never been the dead who haunt this city. It's the ones who left. LAST JULY, DURING another meaningless game of another lost season, Mike Trout stepped into the batter's box at Angel Stadium. The Rangers were up 13-1, and manager Bruce Bochy wanted to rest his exhausted bullpen. So he sent in Ezequiel Duran, a Rangers utility player, to pitch the ninth. During a season in which the average four-seam fastball traveled 94.4 mph, the fastest since this became a statistic in 2008, Duran's first offering got to Trout in a blistering 36 mph. It bounced off the plate. Ball one. Sometime in 2019, during the closest Anaheim got to a last magical summer, something changed. Trout was 27 and hit 45 home runs and drove in 104 runs, with 110 walks and a .645 slugging percentage. The most meaningful statistic in baseball's modern era, wins above replacement, suggested Trout was in the same class as Ty Cobb, Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. Trout won his third MVP. Went to his eighth consecutive All-Star game. Signed a 12-year, $426.5 million contract extension that'd buy the rest of Trout's 20s and most of his 30s, keeping him in Orange County as long as he wanted to stay. The decline had begun. It was invisible, even to him. During the three seasons before 2019, Trout stole 24, 22 and 30 bases. He stole 11 bases in 2019. Perhaps more revealing, he stopped trying. After he was caught stealing on June 17 of that year, he attempted only four more steals the rest of that season. Even his extra bases, the thrill of watching him go first-to-third on a single, came a little less often. His range in center field, according to organization officials, was a little narrower. Speed isn't as exciting as power, but it's what made Mike Trout, Mike Trout. It's also the first marker of youth to go. His was vanishing. With a 1-0 count, Duran readies for his second pitch. Like other position players, his specialty isn't a fastball or a slider. It's the "eephus" pitch, a great rainbow that requires no windup and works only because it messes with time, an attack on the batter's internal clock. During an era of instant everything, it moves slowly. Forty mph this time, up and in. On May 17, 2021, Trout was on second base in Cleveland when Jared Walsh hit a two-out popup to the infield. Trout jogged toward third but recoiled as if he'd been hit in the leg by a line drive. A muscle in his calf had frayed, and Trout hadn't even been running. He touched third, handed his helmet to third-base coach Brian Butterfield and walked into the tunnel. An initial recovery timeline of six to eight weeks became the rest of the season. "Then you start thinking about next year," says Joe Maddon, the Angels' manager in 2021. "We're not going to win anything, I don't think, at that point." Before Duran's 2-0 pitch, he's smiling. He lofts his third pitch, 38 mph, and it arcs just north of the strike zone. Trout uncoils, trying to send the ball to Yorba Linda, but he waits too long. He fouls it off the plate. In 2022, Maddon tried convincing his center fielder to change positions. Trout puts a lot of hard miles on his body, and nothing was wearing him down faster than his herculean swing, which can generate bat speeds of more than 75 mph. From 2012 to 2019, Trout played an average of 145 games, becoming a picture of durability and performance. By 2022, he'd come to the plate 6,174 times. Trout insisted on remaining in center field. Maddon was fired months later. That July, the constant, violent twisting led to one of Trout's ribs trying to pull away from his spine. He missed a month, and the team's trainer said he'd be in pain the rest of his career. "I'm appreciative of all the prayer requests," Trout said then. "But my career is not over." Two balls and a strike, and now it's Trout smiling at Duran. He steps back in. Duran glares at him. By 2023, the Angels decided Trout as everyone knew him was gone. They wanted to get what they could out of him, even if that was a little less great, and put both Trout and the team in the best available positions. Trout had always struggled against elite fastballs, but now he was slow to get around on good ones. He chased bad ones more frequently. Rather than ask Trout for his opinion, new manager Phil Nevin told him that he'd be the team's designated hitter occasionally, would never play more than three consecutive games on artificial turf, and if the club traveled cross-country, that was a "red-flag day," Nevin says now, and Trout wasn't in the lineup. There was one more thing: "Mike was not to run," Nevin says. Trout was aging, and the Angels had to keep him healthy. Then, during a routine at-bat, Trout fractured the hamate bone in his hand. He missed a month, came back for one game, then sat out the rest of the season. "From a personal level for me," Nevin, 55, says now, "it's impossible not to sit there and say, 'Man, remember when I was 21 or 22, and I could do whatever all night?" He pauses. "I mean, s---, it just doesn't work like that anymore," he continues. "It's this inner sadness, you know, because you know it ain't ever coming back." That's not easy for anyone to admit, least of all the best player of a generation. Before you know it, here comes a 42 mph eephus pitch from Duran, bearing down. Trout waits, waits, waits and finally unleashes a hellacious uppercut, the muscle and cartilage and other soft tissue holding on for dear life. He makes contact. The ball pops up, gently, barely past the infield for an easy out. The next Cobb, Ruth, Williams toppled by the world's dullest axe. Duran takes the ball, ready for his next victim. Trout jogs toward the Angels' dugout, shaking his head, looking bewildered about what just happened. BACK IN 1964, a few months before Cherie Tresh gave birth, it still seemed possible that her husband would fulfill the promise. Tom Tresh was a 25-year-old Yankees outfielder, with sideburns and a baby face and power from both sides of the plate. After the first month of the season, he was hitting .367, better than the aging superstar playing center field beside him. Mantle had once been anointed the next Joe DiMaggio. Now baseball was looking for the next Mantle, and it had landed on Tresh, the newest link in a chain that didn't just go forward. That is what the game does. It doesn't accept that something is gone. Managers, scouts, fans keep searching for a new version of the same thing. Barry Sparks, a baseball historian, wrote a book on it -- "The Search for the Next Mickey Mantle" -- this strange habit of a sport that produced exactly one DiMaggio and exactly one Mantle but keeps insisting, decade after decade, that another is on the way. Baseball bargains with time the same way a body does, except its denial is to name a new boy after the old one, so the old one is never really gone. Tresh was the first. Rookie of the year in 1962, an All-Star his first two seasons, a switch-hitter out of Michigan. For two seasons, he looked like the one. Then he struck out 110 times in 1964 and hit .246. The following seasons got worse, and his career was defined not by what he was but by who he wasn't. Four days after the Yankees lost the World Series that fall, Cherie delivered a baby boy. They named him Michael, after Tom's father. They called him Mickey, after the teammate Tom kept trying to be. When Tom died in 2008, the people who spoke at his funeral talked about what he'd become. A college administrator and coach. A father. A generous man. Nobody mentioned the other thing, a mercy the bargain never grants the living. Ken Burns once said baseball is a haunted game, and its ghosts were named Pepitone and Repoz and Murcer. Each was anointed, each supposedly the next Mantle. "A compliment," Kay Murcer, Bobby's widow says now. One foisted upon names we know, Elway and Canseco and Strawberry, and those we don't, Morenz and Suplizio and Merchant. Rickey Henderson and Bo Jackson and Chipper Jones and Bobby Bonds and Eric Davis. Sparky Anderson once said it about Kirk Gibson, and he regretted it until the end. "The worst thing I could've ever done to him," Anderson said. Time kept passing anyway, and for decades the game kept denying and searching, paying no mind to its body count. "You've got to work your way through that," Mickey Tresh says now, "or all you are is a failure." He's 61 now. He played ball, and then he stopped. He spent years learning to define himself by what he was. He went into food service. Got married, had kids, made his peace. Still, every time he introduces himself, he's a reminder of what it's like to be given a name you'll never grow into. "You're not just fighting your own expectations," he says. "You're fighting everyone else's. And who in the world is not going to fall short of being the next Mickey Mantle?" IN THE FIRST inning of the most important game of Mike Trout's career, he turned on a fastball and sent it 412 feet, into the Kansas City fountains. It was October 2014. He had just turned 23. This was the first of so many things. Trout's first playoff hit. His first postseason homer. His first MVP. All with the promise of more. Almost everyone who has ever lived is forgotten. We are born, do our small work, pass the thing to those who come next. This is the arrangement, and most people make their peace because there's no other option. But every so often, once or twice a generation, a person arrives who seems exempt; who can do things so far beyond the reach of mere mortals that time itself seems to lose its grip. Bart Giamatti, the former MLB commissioner and scholar of English Renaissance literature, argued in a 1977 essay that baseball exists less as entertainment than a shield. "You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time," he wrote, "to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive." The old men in the stands at Kauffman Stadium had felt this as boys, watching Mantle, and they'd been waiting 60 years to feel it again. Now here it was, unmistakable, plucked from tiny Millville, New Jersey, where silica sand had been melted a century earlier to make glass, shaped and sent off for the rest of us. A body that young makes it look easy. Thirty-six homers, 111 RBIs, 16 steals. Trout had no nutritionist or recovery chamber or limber-up routine. A 22-year-old can sleep anywhere, because his body was uncompromised, his joints as elastic as his dreams. When the best player in the world went home for Christmas in 2013, with his parents' gifts to him still labeled "From Santa," he crashed into his old bed and slept until whenever. If he had breakfast at all, it might be the Swedish Fish and Sour Patch Kids from his stocking. "I used to wake up," Trout says now, "and not eat until I got to the field." When he was 20, he'd tracked a J.J. Hardy drive to the center-field wall, leaping past the yellow of the outfield wall and returning with a smile on his face and the ball in his glove like a snow cone. He did it again to Prince Fielder, grinning before his spikes were touching the warning track, with a body that gave him every reason. He could hit a ball 489 feet and could sprint almost 30 feet per second and score from second base in 6.8 seconds. To the rest of us, it looked like instinct. Not just preordained but prophesied, because scouts who'd come to New Jersey swore Trout even looked like Mantle. What was certain is that the kid went hard, every time, in blowouts and in Augusts when the Angels were already done, in an era when everyone else was flipping bats and admiring their launch angle. That was the part that felt familiar, a boy who played as if he'd have done it for nothing. The kid hadn't yet learned to listen to his body or to eat breakfast or that the game, the thing he loved, could take anything away. Nobody wanted to think about the fact that the only promise a first ever makes is that somewhere there's also a last. Around the time of that playoff home run, the words "next Mickey Mantle" stopped appearing in news articles. A new search was already underway. The game was already looking for the next Mike Trout. "I need to think," Giamatti's essay continues, "something lasts forever." BY THE END of May, Konnor Griffin had played in 51 games, and after most of them he called his dad. Konnor lives a half-hour outside Pittsburgh, and these conversations were often as much about the things they didn't discuss as the things they did. Kevin has spent nearly two decades coaching softball at Belhaven University, a small Christian school in Mississippi, and during games he slips his phone between the batting helmets of other people's kids so he can sneak glimpses of his own. It's where he watched most of his son's early milestones: Konnor's first home run, stolen base, the three-run throwing error. "You got to flush it," he told Konnor that day. "The beauty of baseball is this one's over, and you get to do it again tomorrow." Tomorrows in particular are a topic best avoided. Among the earliest truths a pro athlete learns is that nobody wants to hear about the grind. Not even family. It took only weeks, not years, for Konnor to learn that baseball is a job, with a few hours that people see as a fantasy and many more hours of meetings and idle time and being shipped from here to there like cargo. And so Konnor doesn't often talk about waking up disoriented, barely aware of where he is. Or the security guard who shadows him, and the fans who once followed him from the stadium to a restaurant, the reason he lives far from the city. Or the eyeballs watching him, relying on him, expecting the next chosen one to be what they need him to be. "A lot of people, even my family, they watch every game," he says. "They want me to play the best of the best, and there's the days where I'm dog tired. I'm trying to give a hundred percent of what I've got that day, and they just want to see me play as hard as I can. It's hard to do that sometimes." Late one night in the clubhouse, he shakes his head. "You don't want to tell anybody and make excuses," he says. "You've just got to keep rolling." Two days later, he reported pain in his throwing arm. Imaging revealed inflammation in a tendon near his elbow, the accumulation of hundreds of throws, the hardest measuring 93.5 mph. The Pirates placed him on the injured list, and it was talked about as the first time Konnor Griffin ever got hurt. It was not. When he was 8, he ran a go-kart into a tension cable, Kevin says, opening his face. He needed emergency reconstructive surgery and 120 stitches to save his eye. He played baseball 10 days later. In 2023, Konnor homered in the last at-bat of his junior season. During the summer that scouts decide on high school players, Kevin says Konnor later went 2-for-12 during a showcase tournament, causing concern about his ability to hit big league pitching. The family hadn't told anyone that, during that home run swing, Konnor had dislocated his left shoulder. Even after rehab, he was afraid of reinjuring it. "You got to cut it loose," Kevin told Konnor. He did, ending his slump before playing for Team USA in Taiwan. He hit .559 with nine home runs and 85 steals during his senior season. Pittsburgh drafted him ninth overall. This summer, Konnor spent a month on the injured list and returned to Pittsburgh on June 26. He launched the second pitch he saw 435 feet into the second deck. Two weeks later, he was back on the injured list after tearing a tendon in his left ring finger while diving for a ball. Kevin was already thinking about his next trip north. Konnor was thinking about avoiding further damage the next four months. "It's tough on the body," Konnor said, just not to his dad. "You're not riding on a bus," Kevin said, but not to his son. "You never really feel like you have a home," Konnor said. "It's luxury," Kevin said. "There could be a whole lot of worse things." MIKE TROUT IS 19. Bat on his shoulder, crooked smile, high cheekbones. Mike Trout is 35. Standing in an underground corridor of Angel Stadium, during a break from rehabbing a hamstring he says is getting better every day, looking at the picture of himself on my phone. "Younger kid," he says. He pauses, studying it. "He put Millville on the map," he continues. Another pause. His eyes don't leave the screen. "What would you like to tell that guy?" I ask him. "Um," he says. "That I still got four more solid years left." Solid. To be great, a man must believe he has never been great enough. That he cannot rest, because to satisfy us, he must somehow give more. More homers, more speed, more years. It's why Trout insists he's as fast as ever, and why, even now, he struggles to accept what everyone around him already knows. A few dozen yards from here is a grass field that Barney Lopas cut to a half inch every day for 30 years. When he became the head groundskeeper at Angel Stadium, his son was 8 days old. Now that baby is expecting his own daughter in October. "Man," Lopas says, "time really goes by fast." Wasn't it just a couple years ago that Trout was blazing across that grass, turning right, then left, before jumping against that yellow wall to pluck J.J. Hardy's home run from the sky? Lopas can almost summon the exhilaration of that moment, of his tiny investment in it, something as addictive as it is rare. "I just want to see a healthy Mike Trout," he says. Near the Angels' dugout is a man in a wheelchair, Kurt Loe, who is 66 and has cerebral palsy. When Trout was a rookie, he and Torii Hunter offered a trade: If the Angels won 10 in a row, Loe would walk. In 2014, thunder came off the kid's bat for two home runs and a double in a 5-2 win against Houston, the Angels' 10th in a row. Afterward, Trout gave Loe the cleats he'd worn, and two other players helped him out of his chair to take one step, then two. Loe cannot be certain there wasn't magic in those shoes. "My life is better," he says now. "That's what I want you to know." Michael Araujo, the stadium's public-address announcer, remembers the sound of the crowd after Trout's 454-foot home run the night he wore Tyler Skaggs's No. 45 jersey, 11 days after his friend's unexpected death. Paul Kott, whose dad drove him past orange groves in 1964, first bought season tickets in the 1990s. It's not a moment Kott remembers but the anticipation of one; that with the chosen one out there, anything can happen. "Like watching Picasso," he says. Nearly a century after Kott's mother took one of those bridges out of Pittsburgh for a new life in Southern California, he is a witness to both time's inevitability and the human folly of denying it. His real estate office is a time capsule, of buildings and parking lots under construction, decorated with black-and-white pictures and old bobblehead dolls and framed ticket stubs. Kott's body is 72, but I ask him how old he is in his mind. "Twenty-two," he says. There's a name for this, but really it's just a kindness the mind gives itself. A promise that good things are still coming. Trout is measured in public, day after day, year after year. Kott, like most of us, can tell himself he's 22 in private, because nobody ever asked him to be the next anyone. Three hours before another game without Trout in the lineup, Rosie Quintero wears a straw usher's hat as she leans against a stadium wall. For two decades she has driven past Disneyland, a place that promises to stop time, to work in a building with old bones. She doesn't remember the date Trout hit for the cycle, but it's a feeling she'll carry forever. She believes, however many years later, that she and the people she helped to their seats that night are connected, as if by electricity, by that shared memory. Listening to Quintero, I think about the melancholy that now surrounds Mike Trout. He's just a man entering middle age, that period between being young and old, telling himself the kid is still in there somewhere. I realize that it's not his passage we're mourning. It's ours. But it's not just grief, because you don't feel the loss of a thing you never had. You mourn the years going, but underneath, you're grateful they were there to have and lose. That woven feeling, carried in the memories of the keepers of a stadium that was here before Trout and will be here after him, doesn't last. It's why, in a sport that long ago hitched itself to the renewal of spring, we will always go looking for another boy. Quintero is turning 67 soon. She says she's proud of it. Once you loosen your grip on who you used to be, she tells me, there's something freeing in it. And unlike youth, it doesn't slip away. It's something you get to keep. MY FATHER GREW up believing that there had been a man, once, who could do everything. Then he was gone, and the man became a finished being, complete, visible at once from beginning to end. But it was the boy I pictured, and still do. I think about him like I do the stories my dad told me, the lessons he gave, the ones he also never got a chance to transmit. Like the version of the man we didn't talk about, alcohol and misspent youth would weaken and later destroy my father's body. He died at 51. In other houses, before the ruin, there were two boys playing ball. One in a yard in Oklahoma and the other trying to be like him. Each learning to swing the other way. Each trying to run hard enough to please his father. The man standing behind Mickey had been named Elven, but everyone called him Mutt. He'd been a coal miner, and he died at 40. Mutt believed his boy's body was strong enough. Of course he did. You stand your son in the yard and fill him with everything you have, and then you don't just send him into the world. You give him to it. And you tell yourself the giving is enough. The lessons, the talent, the body you made and drilled and prayed over will hold. Mutt did not live to see what the world did with his boy. He died young, believing it had been nothing but a gift. A CONTINENT APART, separated by years, Mike Trout and Konnor Griffin talk to each other through a screen. Until last weekend, when they shared a field in Pittsburgh, they had never met. But they texted about deer hunting, and they passed the time by talking about trading cards. How cool would it be, Griffin says, if they appeared on one together? Two panels, two players, visible in the same space. "Maybe do something with hunting," Trout says. "Then we both sign it," Griffin says. I ask Trout which version of himself would be in the picture: the guy who has done it all or the 19-year-old, with everything ahead. He doesn't hesitate. "Me while I was younger," he says. Griffin and Trout are among the only men alive who understand what the other one is. Their conversations don't go this deep, but if Trout longs to be the kid again, the actual kid is already learning an inevitable lesson. Trout feels it. He probably even knows it. It's just something he cannot yet say: that, by the time you recognize youth, it's already gone. Griffin's dad is learning this, too. Five minutes ago, Kevin says, his son was on his lap in the deer stand. Two minutes ago, a father and son were somewhere in Mississippi, another buck in the bed of Kevin's truck, a boy and his dad talking about everything ahead. Any time Konnor goes hunting, Kevin says, "I'm there." Before the season, Kevin answered a video call. On the other end was a grown man in camo, with a soft goatee and a strong jaw, standing in a southeastern Ohio snow. Konnor was beaming. He'd just gotten his first bow kill, two hours of patience and good wind. The doe had emerged from 10 yards. The first thing Konnor did was call his dad. "I just wanted to show it off," he says. Kevin doesn't remember how long they talked. Just that Konnor was there with a buddy, two months before Konnor's wedding, three months before he got called up, four before he wasn't a teenager anymore. Then, in a flash, it was over. One of them ended the call, and Kevin's screen went dark. The boy's face was gone, and the screen showed only a reflection, a man in his mid-50s looking back.