Mike Trout's All-Star Legend Explodes with Career Cycle, Back-to-Back MVPs

The living legends had just left the field when the next legend left the park.

The marketing geniuses at Major League Baseball could hardly have planned it better. They open the All-Star evening by honoring the game's best living players, and then Mike Trout opens the All-Star Game by showing again why he's the best active player.

And as Trout was rounding the bases, completing his own career All-Star cycle with his first All-Star home run, it was hardly a stretch to think that some day in the distant future, he'll be the one walking out there to be honored as a living legend.

Tuesday night, it was Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, joined by Sandy Koufax and Johnny Bench. It was touching, and it could well have been the one moment everyone remembered from this All-Star Game.

It could have been, except for Mike Trout. Who is going to forget Mike Trout?

Who is going to forget the guy is just 23 years old and has already become the first player ever to win MVP honors in back-to-back All-Star Games? Who is going to forget he went Bo Jackson on us Tuesday night, opening the game with a home run off Zack Greinke, just as Jackson opened the bottom of the first in the 1989 All-Star Game with his memorable homer off Rick Reuschel?

"Instant excitement," Mark Teixeira called it later.

Trout is in his fourth major league season, and this was his fourth All-Star Game. He singled in the first one, doubled in the second, tripled in the third and this time added the home run.

There are only nine other guys with career All-Star cycles, and most of them fall into that legend category. Mays was one, and Ted Williams, Roberto Clemente, George Brett and Ernie Banks are also on the list.

None of them got it done before turning 24.

This was quite a night for Trout, who also raced to first base to prevent a double play and scored from second base to get Bryce Harper's attention. And in the seventh inning, when all the other starters from both teams were out of the game (and many were headed to the airport to get out of town), Trout was still there for his fourth plate appearance of the night.

Excluding the 15-inning marathon in 2008, no American League All-Star since 2004 had come to the plate four times (only two National Leaguers had, none since Jose Reyes in 2007).

It seemed fitting that Trout was the one to do it. It seemed fitting that on a night when baseball honored its legends, Trout went deep with a home run and also went deep into the game, the way the legends once did.

This game was widely billed as the All-Star Game for the next generation, with 23-year-olds and 24-year-olds (and also the 22-year-old Harper) everywhere you looked. The idea was the game is in good hands, and the exciting kids should help attract the next generation of fans, too.

It would help more, perhaps, if Trout himself had a little more to say, if his favorite word in interviews wasn't "happy" and his favorite term "having fun."

"I can't explain the feeling right now," he said on ESPN when the game was over.

We'll forgive him that and look elsewhere for the colorful quotes. We'll just keep watching him do all the things we were sure couldn't be done, things like finishing second in the MVP race as a 20-year-old rookie (with many insisting he should have won), and then finishing second the next year and winning it the year after that.

He's a staple in these All-Star Games now, the way Aaron once was, the way Mays once was.

We can appreciate him as we appreciated them, and with baseball's new technology, we can appreciate him in ways we never were able to appreciate them. The new Statcast system showed Trout was running 20.4 mph when he came around to score in the fifth:

Statcast can't tell us how fast Mays ran in the 1960 All-Star Game (when he went 3-for-4 with a stolen base) or what the exit velocity was on Aaron's last All-Star home run in 1972.

The game has moved on, and this All-Star Game with Trout and Harper and Manny Machado and Gerrit Cole showed it's still very much alive.

But even as it moves on, it can still reach into the past, can still tug at our emotions when Aaron and Mays walk out of our memories and onto the field. They're 81 (Aaron) and 84 (Mays) now. Mike Trout won't reach their age until the year 2072.

Who knows what he'll have accomplished by then? We'll just watch and see what baseball's next legend can do.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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