If you're a baseball scout, at some point you're going to get the Mike Trout question. It's a rite of passage Ray Fagnant knows all too well.
"I got into a discussion with a random fan at a game and they were saying, 'How smart can you guys be? You missed the best player on the planet,' " said the Red Sox' Northeast region scout. "I just said, 'You want to hear the real story?' "
It's a good question. How does the guy currently considered by many as the best baseball player on the planet last until the 25th pick in the 2009 Major League Baseball amateur draft?
Or how about this one: Why wouldn't the Red Sox have selected Trout if he slipped to them four spots later? (A reality confirmed by multiple decision-makers involved in the Sox' draft at the time.)
"Nobody," Fagnant said, "could have predicted how good he would be."
With Trout ready to run around Fenway Park for the next three games, it is interesting to reflect on how the Red Sox, and the baseball world, viewed the outfielder heading into the '09 draft.
He has turned into a once-in-a-lifetime kind of talent. Someone who doesn't run but glides. A player who drives the baseball like few in the game. Even a defender who can be a difference-maker in the most spacious of outfields.
So, why would 24 players get taken before him that year? How could the White Sox take another outfielder, Jared Mitchell, just before Los Angeles selected the kid from Millville High School in New Jersey? And what would have led the Red Sox to lock in on Puerto Rican speedster Reymond Fuentes at pick No. 28 instead of hoping Trout slid?
Perhaps nobody can tell "the real story" better than scouts Fagnant and Danny Haas, along with one of Trout's former teammates, Jake Porcello (brother of Rick).
'THE ENERGY WAS INFECTIOUS'
Fagnant pieced it together right away. Trout not only was an energetic, ultra-athletic, soon-to-be junior in high school, but he also was the son of Jeff Trout, a former Twins minor leaguer who had been one of the best collegiate hitters in the country during his stint at the University of Delaware.
The Red Sox' Northeast scout got an even bigger taste of what the younger Trout had to offer after the pair's initial sophomore-year meeting. Playing in a showcase in Lakeland, Florida, the outfielder officially started making an impression on the former Red Sox minor leaguer.
"His athleticism stood out. Right away, the energy was infectious. He was just a great kid to talk to," Fagnant said. "He not only had tools, but he could play baseball. But what struck me most was the enthusiasm.
"We would always have extra hitting and everybody is full of energy the first few days, but then the third day comes and it's 102 degrees at 10 o'clock in the morning and he would be the only one out there. He loved to be around it."
The next October, however, presented perhaps the definitive impression.
Playing for Tri-State Arsenal in the wooden bat world championships in Jupiter, Florida, Trout started making his mark in the eyes of more than just a few area scouts.
To this day, Fagnant seamlessly recalls the at-bat. Trout punctuated a nine-pitch at-bat with a routine grounder to shortstop that resulted in a single thanks to 3.9-second speed down the first-base line. And, of course, that home run.
"He had a pitch he had no right hitting," the scout recalled. "He hit a 2-1 slider off the front porch of a house across a street."
"He hit a home run that went about 650 feet that went over a couple of apartments," said Porcello, a pitcher at the time on Trout's team. "The ball just sounded differently off his bat. And he made me look good a couple of times in the outfield. He was tremendous out there.
"Everybody knew the Trout kid," the New Jersey native added.
Fagnant and the Red Sox' Northeast/Upper Midwest regional crosschecker were sold. The more they saw, the more they liked.
For example, the day before the pair were scheduled to head to spring training, they called Trout to see if he would meet them at a facility 45 minutes from his house for a hitting session. No problem.
"It was pretty clear in the batting cages that you could ask him to do things with the bat and he made adjustments pretty easily," Haas said. "Hit the ball to the right side, he could do it. Hit the ball up the middle, he could do it. Hit a line drive instead of a pop-up, he could do it. He picked things up really fast. ... He played really hard, harder than anybody else on the field
And when Fagnant returned north from Florida, Trout was made a priority. Even before the often-interrupted New Jersey high school baseball season started, he prioritized a scrimmage game because it was a chance to see the outfielder not draw a series of intentional walks. And, finally, came the freezing cold, mud-filled regular season.
"There weren't too many times I would make it a point to see a high school kid play on a Saturday in his first game of the season," Fagnant said. "But I stayed on him. I was kidding my wife that I saw him more that spring than I saw her."
And Fagnant's opinion of Trout wasn't solely formed on the baseball diamond.
"I learned from some of the veteran guys such a good research to watch these kids play other sports," he said. So he did, having took in one of Trout's basketball games against St. Augustine Prep, a team that started all NCAA Division 1 hoops prospects except one -- a future Penn State tight end.
"He absolutely battled," Fagnant noted. "There was one sequence he got rejected like six straight times and on the seventh he went up and scored. He's knocking people down, helping them up, and it showed a lot about his athleticism and joy of competing."
CONVINCING EVERYBODY ELSE
The Red Sox certainly didn't ignore the reports of Fagnant and Haas. That was crystal clear thanks to a visit by then-assistant general manager Ben Cherington.
"What stood out to me specifically was when Ben drove down to Millville and saw him one day, and it was a so-so day for Mike," Fagnant said. "He called that night and said, 'I know it was just a decent day but I know you like him so I'm going to stay and see him again.' What other type front-office person does that? That meant the world to me when I got that call from Ben.
"[Trout] was raw. The swing wasn't always pretty, but what he did notice about the swing was that it was four inches long. And he was so strong he would just ambush balls."
Make no mistake about it, there were plenty of roadblocks preventing an acceptance of Trout as a no-doubter.
First was the weather he had been playing in, and what it meant to transition from 6-foot-1 center on the Millville High hoops team to pitcher/shortstop/outfielder.
"We liked him a lot, but he is hitting for way more power than we could have imagined. And his arm was not great. That spring, he wasn't quite in baseball shape yet," Haas said. "Quite frankly, we saw him run better the summer before. He wasn't running in spring the way he had in summer because he wasn't quite in baseball shape. But it was cold. I remember talking to [current Red Sox director of international and amateur scouting Amiel Sawdaye] down the left-field line and it was like 27 degrees at game time. I'm sitting there fumbling around, trying to put on my first Bluetooth [calling device] because I had these gloves on."
It was simply more comforting getting the chance to see a player play more baseball. Both Red Sox scouts had seen him a bunch. ("He was a kid who was fun to watch. He was fun to scout," Fagnant said. "I never dreaded that 5 1/2-hour drive to Millville because you always saw something good. it was fun to spend time with him.")
But there was a definition in seeing a kid like Fuentes, who was excelling in the year-round baseball-playing climate of Puerto Rico.
"We just had less of an opportunity to scout Trout," Haas said. "Some of us thought we had more of a powerful outfielder in [Ryan] Westmoreland than we probably did. And you're sitting there watching Jacoby Ellsbury steal 40-50 bags in the big leagues and totally impacting the success of the organization and you would like to get that again. A lot of people probably thought here's the next Ellsbury."
In fact, Haas had Westmoreland -- another Northeast high school outfielder whom the Red Sox plucked out of Rhode Island in fifth-round of the 2008 draft -- rated better than Trout. And with that type of player already in the system, taking a first-round flier on a similar situation didn't seem necessary.
In Fuentes' case, he was a left-handed burner. "Would we have taken [Trout] there? We still probably would have taken Fuentes," Haas said. "Westy was starting to show big power. Westy popped up kind of late for us and [former Red Sox amateur scouting director Jason McLeod] called me and said, 'I think I just saw Larry Walker,' which was a good call. As big and strong and with the kind of arm Westy had you could easily see him playing in right field."
One early-round high school outfielder was enough. As much as he loved Trout, Fagnant got it then, and still gets it now.
"I knew that there was no way he was getting to us. [Angels scout and former teammate of Jeff Trout] Greg Morhardt was on him and I knew there was no way Anaheim was going to pass on him. Greg was always there.
"There was some rawness there. If anybody said today that you wanted to take him in the second round, that would have been perfectly correct. They're still correct. Nobody could have projected the development that he made. Even now you couldn't criticize anyone from saying we loved him but there were still so many variables. I understood from Day 1. High school, Northesast, right-handed-hitting outfielder -- that's just not a good fit.
"Had he gotten to us and we wouldn't have taken him I would have understood completely, because every statistic in the industry is against a high school right-handed-hitting outfielder from the Northeast."
The rest is history.
Trout became the face of big league baseball. Fuentes ultimately was dealt to San Diego in the trade for Adrian Gonzalez, and now plays for the Royals' Triple-A affiliate in Omaha. Westmoreland's career came to an abrupt end due to surgeries to treat a cavernous malformation at his brainstem. And Mitchell, the outfielder selected by the White Sox just before Trout, was released by Chicago two weeks ago.
And, of course, the scouts still have their memories.
"You could go in there with one look at him early and say, hey, you've got a really good athlete from the Northeast who is a long way away. You know the demographic: a high school, right-hand-hitting outfielder," Fagnant said. "But he would do something every day, though, that would light you up, something nobody else could do."
"He's just a great story," added Haas, "a great kid."