YAHOO -
At first, Jim Cantore thought the
question was a joke. Then he saw the blue checkmark verifying the
Twitter account that sent it and realized the best baseball player in
the world really did want to know everything he could about the size of
the snowstorm headed for New Jersey.
“All of a sudden, I get this direct message from Mike Trout,”
said Cantore, the Weather Channel’s voluble on-camera meteorologist and
among the most trusted voices in forecasting today. “He’s asking me
about the storm. Not like, ‘Hey, Jim, it’s Mike.’ He just went right
into the details. He was genuinely curious about what the models said.”
For all of Trout’s star power and the possibility of back-to-back
American League MVP trophies, precious little is known about him away
from the field. Which is why Cantore, a New York Yankees fan, was tickled to learn something that a few Internet sleuths later figured out.
Mike Trout is a weather geek. And if he weren’t patrolling center field for the Los Angeles Angels
nightly, the 24-year-old figures he would be holed away in some corner
of the northeast where snow falls during the winter delivering the daily
weather report on local TV.
“I would love to try it,” Trout said. Instead, Trout consumes weather
information with a voraciousness that’s apparent to his Angels
teammates. On his phone, he said, is a folder of apps called “Weather.”
Trout scrolls through different models (Global Forecast System, European
Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, North American Ensemble
Forecast System) and others that specify short-, medium- and long-range
forecasting. If ever there’s a question about whether the Angels are
going to play a particular game with gloomy skies above, they know whom
to ask.
Garrett Richards
saw Trout’s forecast-following prowess early in his career. The two
roomed together in the minor leagues from 2009-11. At Double-A in Little
Rock, Ark., they spent late nights grilling food and watching the rain.
“We’d have bad thunderstorms
there,” Richards said. “He’d always be checking the radar. And we had a
balcony at our apartment. He’d go out there and sit all night.” Trout’s weather obsession
started in the same place as Cantore’s: a deep desire to avoid class and
a common bond with dad. “I was young, and I always wanted to get off
school,” Trout said. “So I’d ask, ‘When’s the snowstorm coming?’ I was
the kid in class who would see snow out the window and start looking at
it and want to play with it.” Trout said his father, Jeff, fostered his
love for storms even more, and whether it was ski trips or just sitting
atop a mountain and watching flakes fall, it mesmerized Trout.
Because he ended up in Los
Angeles, Trout grew accustomed to its one season of perfect weather. He
lives in Laguna Beach and has a private beach on which he drinks his
coffee every morning. Life without snow, he admits, isn’t the worst
thing in the world. Still, he can’t help but chase bad weather every now
and again. Once during spring training, Trout noticed on a model that
Flagstaff, Ariz., was going to get blanketed with snow. The Angels had a
day off, so Trout drove the 2½ hours north to watch the storm.
All of Trout’s social-media allusions to weather – tweets
from screenshots of the Weather Channel app, other tweets to the wonky
@NJWeatherBlogs, Facebook posts of forecasts – led one Reddit user in
May to posit a theory:
“Mike Trout [maybe secretly] wants to be a meteorologist.” Another user
said Trout followed more than 20 weather-related accounts, though a
recent look through his followers found no fewer than 36, including one
specific to Maryland (@TerpWeather), a local Connecticut TV guy
(@TylerJankoski), a handful of AccuWeather experts and, of course, Jim
Cantore, with whom he’ll DM regularly during particularly ugly storms.
They’ve discussed helping Trout fulfill part of his childhood dream this
offseason. He spends every winter in his house on the outskirts of
Millville, the south Jersey town in which he grew up. And should a big
storm hit the area this offseason, the Weather Channel wants to offer
Trout a correspondent’s gig.
“We’re planning on me doing a
story when there’s a big storm in Jersey,” he said. “I’m gonna be on the
Weather Channel. Hopefully, we get a big snowstorm.” And if not,
perhaps he can do it like Cantore and follow the bad weather where it
goes. “A sick vacation for me,” Trout said, “would be to go to upstate
New York when a big snowstorm hits.”
In the meantime, all Trout gets
to chase are flyballs. Never has he gone after bad weather – Richards,
an Oklahoma native, has invited him home to hunt for tornadoes – and
considering he’s still improving, Trout may be playing baseball through
plenty more El Niños than the one scheduled to hit California this
winter. That hasn’t stopped Cantore from dreaming about Trout’s
post-career plans and trying to steal him away from post-career
baseball-broadcasting opportunities.
“I definitely see this guy
chasing tornadoes, standing in snowstorms,” Cantore said. “And I hope
I’ll be right there alongside him.”
I'm in no position to sit here and make fun of Mike Trout. If I could switch lives with one person in the world it would probably be him. But you've got to be kidding me with this. Weather? The most mundane, boring thing there is to talk about. You know when you're stuck on an elevator with someone you kind of know but don't really care about and you bring up the weather outside because you can't think of anything else and everyone can relate to that? Well those conversations get Mike Trout going. Get his wheels turning at a crazy pace. Of course I wish I loved something as much as Mike Trout loves weather. I wish I had interests other than sports and drinking. But there's gotta be a better way to spend your spare time when you're the best baseball player in the world than driving 2.5 hours to Flagstaff, Arizona to watch a snow squall.
The craziest thing is there are so many people that would kill to play in California and he probably can't stand it. Just mopes around the clubhouse all day because it never rains and the weather is always beautiful and boring. The team goes on a road trip in April to some shitty city like Minnesota where it's still snowing and he gets amped. They go to Seattle and the tarp comes out and the rest of the team heads to the clubhouse to play cards or something and he's still outside sitting on the railing watching the droplets fall in amazement.
And Garret Richards is a weird dude too. You invited Trout to Oklahoma so you could hunt for tornadoes like you're fucking Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt? Yea that's how you wanna go out Mike. Have your life and career cut short because you voluntarily got sucked up into the sky by a fucking twister.
