AL MVP/First Soccer Post

AL MVP

Mike Trout deserved to be the MVP in my opinion.  He completely changed that team when he was called up after the first month of the season.  He played his ass off every night injecting life into a team that started the season 6-14 without him.  If you were to develop a player in a lab, Trout would be it, he has no weaknesses.  Cabrera can hit, and that's it.  Four times a game he stepped up to the plate and helped his team, but the rest of the game he was a liability.  He was a poor defensive player, didn't run the bases well, he is what Billy Butler is for the Royals.  Trout stole 49 bases and was only caught 5 times, a stat I feel got overlooked when people evaluated him.  I also hate the argument that Cabrera led his team to the playoffs while Trout didn't, THE ANGELS WON MORE GAMES.  I'm not going to complain too much because Cabrera did have a great season, and the fact that he won the Triple Crown is pretty cool.

Here's a shout-out to Buster Posey for deservedly winning the NL MVP (I don't want my San Francisco fan to complain).

Soccer

I can't decide what to do about soccer with this blog and keep asking myself these questions.

Does anybody care about soccer?

Would anybody like to learn about soccer?

Should I focus on...

Sporting KC?  

The entire MLS?  

The U.S. Men's national team?  

European Soccer?  

It's pretty complicated so feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Talking to my former basketball coach a few months ago I realized this is the first generation in America to grow up with soccer as a relevant sport.  Soccer 20-30 years ago would be like cricket today.  And now it's one of the most popular sports for kids growing up.  The U.S. National Team is slowly getting better along with the MLS developing into a strong league.  I love the way the game is developing right now, naturally, without the "help" of ESPN.

I think two reasons soccer isn't growing even faster is because of ESPN and the media.  The first blunder was how they handled Freddy Adu.  Adu was a promising young player that had the potential to develop into a star.  ESPN created a prodigy, putting an enormous hype around him, making him out to be way better than he actually was.  He signed with an MLS team at the age of 14 and was playing against the big boys right away.  Youth soccer stars are brought up through youth academies, playing with kids their age, and their competition till about 18 years old until they slowly worked into the team, like most athletes are.  What the MLS did ruined Adu and he has never developed into anything more than an average player, creating disappoint in those who bought into the hype.

The next mistake ESPN made was the way David Beckham was glorified.  First of all ESPN stated that Beckham signed a 5 year 250 million dollar contract.  That was ESPN being completely wrong, with all of the endorsements it totaled about 50 million dollars a year, but in reality he signed a 5 year 32 million dollar contract with the L.A. Galaxy (the Yankees of the MLS).  They also made it sound like he was going to take the MLS to a different level, I believed he was going to be scoring goals every game.  But Beckham is not somebody who scores a lot of goals, he sits back in the midfield making great passes, and scores once every five games, on average.  Once again fans were let down when Beckham turned out to be a pretty boring player.  ESPN has done a poor job handling soccer and has pushed a lot of people away from the game by creating hype and disappointments in Adu and Beckham.

Hope you enjoyed this post, please let me know if you are interested in reading soccer posts in the future.