What The Actual F***, Mike?

Beware those we admire, young scribes, for should that veneer of near-superhumanity ever fall, you may be shocked by the ugliness it concealed. The late, great Chadwick Boseman once said, “The only difference between a hero and a villain is that the villain chooses to use that power in a way that is selfish and hurts other people.”

From the moment Mike Trout burst onto the Major League scene in 2012, he was baseball’s golden boy — Mickey Mantle with an iPhone plan. His power majestic, his speed breathtaking, his face perfectly sculpted for Wheaties boxes and hometown murals. He was everything baseball wanted to believe it still was: simple, humble, and superhuman. He hit moonshots, stole bases, smiled for the cameras, and somehow avoided every scandal of the social-media era.

He was also close friends with Tyler Skaggs.

The Ballad of Tyler

If you've been living under a rock for the last several years, or have never had even a passing interest in baseball, you may not know the backstory. Skaggs was a talented left-handed pitcher in the Angels starting rotation. He and Trout played in the low minor leagues together as recent draftees before Skaggs was traded away, but their friendship remained. And when Skaggs returned to the Angels in 2014, it was like nothing had changed. Cagney and Lacy. Murtaugh and Riggs. Trout and Skaggs. On July 1, 2019, Skaggs was found dead in his hotel room. An autopsy confirmed the cause of death as a lethal combination of Oxycodone, Fentanyl, and alcohol. The subsequent investigation would reveal that an Angels employee named Eric Kay was responsible for the drugs that killed Skaggs, and was known to provide other Angels players with drugs as well. Kay is currently serving 22 years in federal prison.

Trout, apart from the anecdotal bits of history and friendship, never came up beyond peripherally in the story.

Until, of course, now.

The Testimony

In the Skaggs family’s wrongful death suit against the Angels, Trout took the stand this week. And what spilled out was the kind of revelation that makes you look at your framed baseball cards a little differently. Trout admitted to paying Kay to do degrading “clubhouse challenges”: shaving off his eyebrows, eating dead bugs off the floor, and, most grotesquely, biting a zit off Trout’s back — all for cash.

Cash that a visibly addicted Kay almost certainly used to feed the habit that eventually killed Skaggs, and ended up with him incarcerated for decades.

Trout claims he didn’t know about Kay’s drug addiction. Maybe. But let’s be honest — we’ve all known a junkie. You don’t need a toxicology report to recognize one. The tremor, the sweat, the hollow eyes. The mannerisms. The mood swings. The withdrawals. You know. You always know.

So when the face of Major League Baseball stood there letting an addict gnaw at a pustule on his back for pocket change, it wasn’t just bad judgment. It was cruelty — frat-house sadism masquerading as camaraderie.

The Fall of the Hero

For more than a decade, Trout was the last pure thing in baseball — the everyman god who never courted chaos. Now we see the cracks. Maybe the worst part isn’t that he did it. It’s that he thought it was funny.

If there was one player in the major leagues who you had to bet your life on to be above behavior like this, it would have been Trout.

The myth of the incorruptible hero is dead, again. There are no saints in cleats, no gods in the outfield. Just men — some brilliant, some broken — playing a game and sometimes playing with lives.

So, yeah. What the actual f***, Mike.

Torsten / 120 Proof Ball

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