NEW YORK – Baseball’s Best Player™ is in the largest media market in the country this week as the Los Angeles Angels take on the New York Yankees. And so, naturally, Mike Trout held a mini-press conference of sorts on Wednesday for a group of reporters. His first request was that the questions focus on the sport that he actually plays.
Unfortunately, as Trout himself would later attest, people are very passionate about fantasy football. And if the drama is juicy enough (or silly enough) and the people involved are professional athletes, then they’re even passionate about someone else’s fantasy football.
A news cycle that could have been about whether Trout’s sustained excellence could finally push the Angels to October was summarily supplanted by Cincinnati Reds outfielder Tommy Pham, who revealed yesterday that the commissioner of the now-famous fantasy football league populated by MLB players who sometimes slap each other over roster rules disputes, is none other than Mike Trout himself.
If you remember: Pham slapped Giants outfielder Joc Pederson during batting practice last Friday. This resulted in Pham being suspended for three games and began a series of increasingly absurd media scrums in which both sides attested to participating in a 12-team league with a $10,000 buy-in (with the team in last place paying an additional $10,000) that was broken into pieces. last season when Pham took issue with Pederson’s use of IR. (Plus “four or five” jokes about the Padres’ poor play toward the end of the season.)
With the well of unpredictable twists and laughable accusations running low, Pham told members of the media in Cincinnati that “Trout did a terrible job, man.”
Pham called him “the worst commissioner in fantasy sports, because he let a lot of shit happen and he could have solved everything.”
At least he admitted that it was an unenviable position: “No one wanted to be commissioner, I didn’t want to be the damn commissioner. I have other shit to do. He didn’t want to do it; we put it on It was also our fault, because we named him commissioner.”
Well, that brings us back to New York, where Trout dutifully talked about stopping the Angels’ recent streak and how excited he is to head back east for a few minutes before being asked about his role in Slapgate.
“I’m not talking about fantasy football,” Trout said ruefully.
“Everyone is competitive,” he offered by way of explanation. “Everyone loves fantasy football, who doesn’t?”
(I, for the record, don’t love fantasy football.)
He said he talked to everyone in the league, that it was the media that “dragged him” (uh, Tommy Pham disagrees), and once again tried to corner the conversation by simply saying, “Just passionate about fantasy football.” ”
As for his own personal future in what he called “a legendary fantasy football league, for sure,” it’s unclear.
“I’m going to quit? Uh, I haven’t made that decision,” Trout said. “But all the commissioners I know always get booed.”
He declined to comment on whether Pederson did, in fact, break league rules with his interpretation of injured reserve.
Bottom line: How the heck did Tommy Pham literally force Mike Trout to be reluctantly commissioned?
Reference-sports.yahoo.com