Nice story I had just read that I thought some would appreciate:
When Don and Robin Grawe agreed to be a host family for the Single-A Cedar Rapids Kernels in 2010, they weren’t sure what they were signing up for. They’d done it as a favor to Lanny Peterson, the Kernels housing coordinator, who’d brought up the idea at church one Sunday. “Oh,” Robin replied. “That might be fun!” Now that their sons were grown, the Grawes had extra space in their empty nest, a four-bedroom home on a hillside in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The team flew in one evening in the first week of April 2010 and bused to Veteran Memorial Stadium. Don and Robin were given the names of two 18-year-olds they’d never heard of. They wandered the concourse, weaving past bags and baseball detritus until running into a lanky, laidback Californian and an energetic Jersey kid who introduced themselves as Tyler and Mike.
Tyler Skaggs. Mike Trout.
That night, as Trout and Skaggs unpacked in the walk-out basement they’d share, Don went into his home office and Googled the players’ names. Both were first-round picks with million-dollar signing bonuses the previous year.
“I was like, oh, these kids must be pretty good,” Don recalls now, 12 years later, then laughs at his Larry David-esque understatement.
This was back before Trout was the best player on the planet, before he was the highest-paid man in baseball history, before he was a surefire first-ballot Hall of Famer, before he had three MVPs and four second-place finishes, before he was a husband and a father, before he was the much-criticized commissioner of a high-roller fantasy football league, before he was 30 and having one of his best seasons yet — slashing .292/.396/.616 with 13 homers to fuel the Angels’ playoff hopes.
Back then, Trout was anonymous to the average fan. That changed in Cedar Rapids. His three months with the Kernels were when the baseball world realized Mike Trout was, well, Mike Trout.
He showed cartoonish speed. He mashed baseballs. He stole homers. He rocketed to the top of prospect lists as talent evaluators discovered that the high schooler they had scouted on soggy fields in frigid northeast weather was, in fact, a superstar in the making.
The Athletic spoke with Trout’s former teammates, coaches, hosts and others in the Angels organization to tell the story of the Iowa summer when Trout strode into the spotlight.
No one remembers it better than Don and Robin. Trout and Skaggs still have a special hold on their hearts. They watched as the two boys who crushed junk food in their basement became big leaguers; celebrated with them on their wedding days; mourned with their families when Skaggs died of an opioid overdose in 2019. To Don and Robin, the two of them will always be Mike and Tyler, the 18-year-olds cheerfully bouncing up the stairs each morning.
“It’s a time we’ll never forget,” Don says.
Trout had been in Cedar Rapids once before, but only briefly. In September 2009, three months after graduating from Millville Senior High School in New Jersey, Trout was called up to join the Kernels for the Midwest League playoffs after batting .360 as a 17-year-old in rookie ball.
“Has anyone ever said you look like a young Mickey Mantle?” longtime Kernels general manager Jack Roeder asked after picking up Trout at the airport.
“Yeah,” Trout said, with a smile, “I’ve heard that.”
Trout was the youngest player on the Kernels roster by two years. He appeared in only one postseason game — as a pinch-runner — because manager Bill Moisello wanted to reward the players who had carried Cedar Rapids to a 78-60 regular-season record. With Trout on the bench, the Kernels lost in the semifinals. “I was dumb enough to not even start him,” Moisello says.
For that first stint in Cedar Rapids, Trout and a teammate stayed with Bill and Janis Quinby. When Trout arrived in his black 2009 Toyota Tacoma — his signing-bonus splurge — Bill backed the couple’s car out of the garage and told Trout to park inside. “Oh no, Mr. Quinby, my truck can sit in the driveway,” Trout said. The neighborhood was safe, but Bill wouldn’t have forgiven himself if someone stole Trout’s truck. Bill peeked through the window of the Tacoma and saw the backseat was littered with Old Hickory baseball bats and Nike gloves and spikes Trout had gotten from his endorsements. Bill asked how expensive all of that equipment was. Trout guessed $3,000. That was that. The truck went into the garage.
Bill, a retired Big Ten and NFL official now in his 90s, recalls how Janis would make the players breakfast each morning, and they’d help her tidy up the kitchen afterward. “We had the best relationship you could ever have with two young men that you had never met before,” Bill says. Janis died four years ago, and it’s still meaningful to him how kind those players were to her.
Before heading home to New Jersey, Trout thanked the Quinbys by taking them to dinner in Cedar Rapids. He gave Bill a mitt and a pair of spikes. The shoes didn’t fit, so Bill gave those back, but he kept the glove for his grandson.
Jeremy Berg, a reliever on the 2010 Kernels, remembers hearing that of the two high-school outfielders the Angels had drafted back-to-back in the first round in 2009 — Randal Grichuk 24th, Trout 25th — one was a power guy and the other a speed guy. Sizing them up in spring training, Berg assumed Trout, who had 25 pounds on Grichuk, was the power guy.
It took Berg only one workout to realize he was wrong. Supposedly, Trout was the speed guy. He really was both. Trout was one of the fastest players in the organization — so speedy that then-Angels GM Tony Reagins says he believed Trout would steal 50 bases per season in the majors — and he homered five times in the last week of spring training, flexing the muscle he’d added that winter.
“Someone asked, ‘Dude, what did you do?’” infielder Jon Karcich remembers. “Mike said, ‘I just crushed steak and Pepsi all offseason long.’”
The Pepsi-and-steak pop in spring training made it more surprising when the season started in Cedar Rapids and Trout’s power surge immediately ceased. That’s why everyone’s first memory of Trout’s 2010 season in Cedar Rapids is of Trout pounding the ball into the ground and busting it down the baseline. Roeder recalls watching from the press box as Trout beat out a routine grounder. He asked the broadcast producer, “Can you replay that? I missed something.”
Roeder hadn’t missed a thing. The shortstop charged, fielded the ball cleanly and fired to first. Trout just outran it. Eleven of his first 13 hits that season were infield singles. He was out of sorts at the plate yet batting .313. “You’re like, this guy’s never getting into a slump with that speed,” catcher Jose Jimenez says.
On another April day at the Kernels ballpark, former Angels GM Bill Stoneman told Roeder, “Trout’s the fastest player I’ve seen home to first base,” before adding a caveat: “I never saw Mantle at his prime run home to first.” Moisello remembers a scout clocking Trout at 3.89 seconds to first — an outrageous time for a right-handed hitter — on another infield single.
“You hear him when he runs,” Moisello says.
“It’s like the ground was shaking,” adds outfielder Jeremy Cruz.
Still, Kernels hitting coach Brenton Del Chiaro thought Trout’s all-speed, no-slug start might be eating at him, so he sat Trout down one afternoon in late April to ask how he was feeling. “Deli, I’m not seeing the ball great,” Trout told him, as upbeat as ever. “But I will.”
‘A time we’ll never forget’: Inside the Iowa summer when Mike Trout became a superstar
It was during his months with the Cedar Rapids Kernals that the baseball world realized Mike Trout was, well, Mike Trout.
theathletic.com
When Don and Robin Grawe agreed to be a host family for the Single-A Cedar Rapids Kernels in 2010, they weren’t sure what they were signing up for. They’d done it as a favor to Lanny Peterson, the Kernels housing coordinator, who’d brought up the idea at church one Sunday. “Oh,” Robin replied. “That might be fun!” Now that their sons were grown, the Grawes had extra space in their empty nest, a four-bedroom home on a hillside in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The team flew in one evening in the first week of April 2010 and bused to Veteran Memorial Stadium. Don and Robin were given the names of two 18-year-olds they’d never heard of. They wandered the concourse, weaving past bags and baseball detritus until running into a lanky, laidback Californian and an energetic Jersey kid who introduced themselves as Tyler and Mike.
Tyler Skaggs. Mike Trout.
That night, as Trout and Skaggs unpacked in the walk-out basement they’d share, Don went into his home office and Googled the players’ names. Both were first-round picks with million-dollar signing bonuses the previous year.
“I was like, oh, these kids must be pretty good,” Don recalls now, 12 years later, then laughs at his Larry David-esque understatement.
This was back before Trout was the best player on the planet, before he was the highest-paid man in baseball history, before he was a surefire first-ballot Hall of Famer, before he had three MVPs and four second-place finishes, before he was a husband and a father, before he was the much-criticized commissioner of a high-roller fantasy football league, before he was 30 and having one of his best seasons yet — slashing .292/.396/.616 with 13 homers to fuel the Angels’ playoff hopes.
Back then, Trout was anonymous to the average fan. That changed in Cedar Rapids. His three months with the Kernels were when the baseball world realized Mike Trout was, well, Mike Trout.
He showed cartoonish speed. He mashed baseballs. He stole homers. He rocketed to the top of prospect lists as talent evaluators discovered that the high schooler they had scouted on soggy fields in frigid northeast weather was, in fact, a superstar in the making.
The Athletic spoke with Trout’s former teammates, coaches, hosts and others in the Angels organization to tell the story of the Iowa summer when Trout strode into the spotlight.
No one remembers it better than Don and Robin. Trout and Skaggs still have a special hold on their hearts. They watched as the two boys who crushed junk food in their basement became big leaguers; celebrated with them on their wedding days; mourned with their families when Skaggs died of an opioid overdose in 2019. To Don and Robin, the two of them will always be Mike and Tyler, the 18-year-olds cheerfully bouncing up the stairs each morning.
“It’s a time we’ll never forget,” Don says.
Trout had been in Cedar Rapids once before, but only briefly. In September 2009, three months after graduating from Millville Senior High School in New Jersey, Trout was called up to join the Kernels for the Midwest League playoffs after batting .360 as a 17-year-old in rookie ball.
“Has anyone ever said you look like a young Mickey Mantle?” longtime Kernels general manager Jack Roeder asked after picking up Trout at the airport.
“Yeah,” Trout said, with a smile, “I’ve heard that.”
Trout was the youngest player on the Kernels roster by two years. He appeared in only one postseason game — as a pinch-runner — because manager Bill Moisello wanted to reward the players who had carried Cedar Rapids to a 78-60 regular-season record. With Trout on the bench, the Kernels lost in the semifinals. “I was dumb enough to not even start him,” Moisello says.
For that first stint in Cedar Rapids, Trout and a teammate stayed with Bill and Janis Quinby. When Trout arrived in his black 2009 Toyota Tacoma — his signing-bonus splurge — Bill backed the couple’s car out of the garage and told Trout to park inside. “Oh no, Mr. Quinby, my truck can sit in the driveway,” Trout said. The neighborhood was safe, but Bill wouldn’t have forgiven himself if someone stole Trout’s truck. Bill peeked through the window of the Tacoma and saw the backseat was littered with Old Hickory baseball bats and Nike gloves and spikes Trout had gotten from his endorsements. Bill asked how expensive all of that equipment was. Trout guessed $3,000. That was that. The truck went into the garage.
Bill, a retired Big Ten and NFL official now in his 90s, recalls how Janis would make the players breakfast each morning, and they’d help her tidy up the kitchen afterward. “We had the best relationship you could ever have with two young men that you had never met before,” Bill says. Janis died four years ago, and it’s still meaningful to him how kind those players were to her.
Before heading home to New Jersey, Trout thanked the Quinbys by taking them to dinner in Cedar Rapids. He gave Bill a mitt and a pair of spikes. The shoes didn’t fit, so Bill gave those back, but he kept the glove for his grandson.
Jeremy Berg, a reliever on the 2010 Kernels, remembers hearing that of the two high-school outfielders the Angels had drafted back-to-back in the first round in 2009 — Randal Grichuk 24th, Trout 25th — one was a power guy and the other a speed guy. Sizing them up in spring training, Berg assumed Trout, who had 25 pounds on Grichuk, was the power guy.
It took Berg only one workout to realize he was wrong. Supposedly, Trout was the speed guy. He really was both. Trout was one of the fastest players in the organization — so speedy that then-Angels GM Tony Reagins says he believed Trout would steal 50 bases per season in the majors — and he homered five times in the last week of spring training, flexing the muscle he’d added that winter.
“Someone asked, ‘Dude, what did you do?’” infielder Jon Karcich remembers. “Mike said, ‘I just crushed steak and Pepsi all offseason long.’”
The Pepsi-and-steak pop in spring training made it more surprising when the season started in Cedar Rapids and Trout’s power surge immediately ceased. That’s why everyone’s first memory of Trout’s 2010 season in Cedar Rapids is of Trout pounding the ball into the ground and busting it down the baseline. Roeder recalls watching from the press box as Trout beat out a routine grounder. He asked the broadcast producer, “Can you replay that? I missed something.”
Roeder hadn’t missed a thing. The shortstop charged, fielded the ball cleanly and fired to first. Trout just outran it. Eleven of his first 13 hits that season were infield singles. He was out of sorts at the plate yet batting .313. “You’re like, this guy’s never getting into a slump with that speed,” catcher Jose Jimenez says.
On another April day at the Kernels ballpark, former Angels GM Bill Stoneman told Roeder, “Trout’s the fastest player I’ve seen home to first base,” before adding a caveat: “I never saw Mantle at his prime run home to first.” Moisello remembers a scout clocking Trout at 3.89 seconds to first — an outrageous time for a right-handed hitter — on another infield single.
“You hear him when he runs,” Moisello says.
“It’s like the ground was shaking,” adds outfielder Jeremy Cruz.
Still, Kernels hitting coach Brenton Del Chiaro thought Trout’s all-speed, no-slug start might be eating at him, so he sat Trout down one afternoon in late April to ask how he was feeling. “Deli, I’m not seeing the ball great,” Trout told him, as upbeat as ever. “But I will.”