Angels’ Mike Trout is a man about his town, and vice versa

MILLVILLE, N.J. — Norman Rockwell never visited this small south New Jersey town, but he rendered its likeness in hundreds of paintings, from the low-slung brick storefronts along Main Street to the snow-covered banks of the Maurice River.

He painted the people, too, all square jaws and determination. Hard working. Humble.

“Salt of the earth,” Mayor Tim Shannon says.

Shannon should know. In addition to being mayor he’s fifth-generation Millvillian, part of a family that first settled here just after the Civil War.

“There is a core of Millville people that have been here for generations,” he says. “As a newbie coming in, you’re just not readily accepted. You’ve got to pay some dues.”

Jeff Trout, Shannon’s former neighbor, is another longtime resident. He followed his father and grandfather into the now-shuttered glass, rubber and heavy machinery factories that once powered Millville, a throwback town that imbues its native sons and daughters with throwback values.

“It’s not a town where you’re going to find a lot of doctors and lawyers,” Trout says. “It’s blue collar to the core.”

The Trouts did find time to play baseball, though. Among the few summers Jeff spent away from Millville were four he spent hitting .303 as a minor leaguer in the Minnesota Twins’ system. Jeff’s father had been a star at the local high school, and his grandfather was such a good hitter his nickname was “Bats.”

Then there’s Jeff’s youngest, the one whom everyone here calls Mikey. As a child, he lined rocks, whiffle balls and anything else he could swing at off the vinyl siding of Shannon’s house.

Last year, Mike Trout was the American League rookie of the year, batting .326 with 30 home runs for the Angels, and leading the league with 49 stolen bases and 129 runs.

The big leagues had rarely seen a freshman season anywhere as productive as Trout’s. And Millville — quiet, modest Millville — had never experienced anything like it.

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Mike Trout is everywhere but nowhere in Millville, a town of 28,000 about 45 miles — and five decades — from Philadelphia.

“It’s got a little 1950s in it and it’s got a little 2013 in it,” says sportswriter Michael McGarry of the Press of Atlantic City. “And they love high school sports.”

The Thunderbolts of Millville High — the only high school in town — sell season tickets to their football games. And at the Sidelines Sports Bar across town, owner Ted Lambert has framed the jerseys of the 10 most recent Millville players to make at least second-team all-state — including the No. 54 jersey he wore in 1989.

On many nights, hobbled men with graying hair gather at the bar to recount their glory days, telling stories of long-ago games most everyone else has forgotten.

But young Mike Trout, still only 21, is the most famous player to wear a Thunderbolts uniform. He played just one season of high school football even though the coaching staff promised to rewrite its offensive playbook if he returned at quarterback as a sophomore.

In basketball, Trout was a 6-foot-1 all-league forward who averaged 14.7 points and 11 rebounds per game and could dunk from a standing start in street clothes. In baseball, he batted .531 in 26 games as a senior, homering a state-record 18 times — one more than the number of strikeouts he had in four seasons.

So while Millville is home to a former Miss New Jersey, it’s Trout’s photo that hangs on a back wall at Jim’s Lunch, a popular downtown diner, and it’s Trout who is on the poster taped inside the front window of the S&J; Pizzeria a couple of blocks away. It’s Trout’s smiling face that crowds a banner in the lobby of city hall, dwarfing the framed portraits of the five city commissioners, and it’s his name that could soon be affixed to the Millville High baseball field.

But the real Trout has been about as visible as a vapor trail around town this winter. His black Mercedes CSL is frequently parked in front his parents’ two-story house on what used to be a quiet cul-du-sac just outside town, but visitors are most often told he isn’t home.

To avoid crowds, he trains with weights after 10 p.m., when the door to the Center for Health and Fitness has been locked and everyone else has been sent home. When a gaggle of curious school kids approach him at the Cumberland Mall, they’re intercepted by Nicole Maul, a family friend who has known Mike since his mother first wheeled him into Jim’s Lunch in a baby stroller.

“That’s not Mike, it’s his brother,” says Maul, whose fib assures Trout a few more precious minutes of peace in a winter so hectic his parents changed their cellphone numbers after being interrupted 27 times during a 45-minute dinner.

Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Trout. A sponsor is demanding a photo shoot like the one GQ magazine got. ESPN wants to send a film crew to watch Trout work out. And friends and neighbors continue to request a photo, autograph or a few minutes of time.

“It’s gotten difficult the last couple of weeks,” Jeff Trout says. “There’s no book, there’s no way to handle this. Every day’s kind of a struggle, the decisions to be made on where to go, who to talk to and what to do.”

Obliging everyone would leave little time to eat and sleep — much less to prepare for a baseball season — which is one reason Mike Trout declined to meet with The Times. But ignoring everyone invites jealous whispers that Trout has gotten too famous for his homespun hometown.

Truth is, Trout needs Millville and its humble small-town values as much as the struggling town, with its soaring unemployment and battered pride, needs its most famous son.

The Angels outfielder returned here last season, briefly escaping the big league spotlight to sleep in his old bedroom, trade stories with boyhood friends and become grounded again by a place where his aw-shucks demeanor and Mickey Mantle buzz-cut are as common as the crowds waiting for burgers at Jim’s Lunch.

“You know what I like about him? He’s not cocky,” Maul says as she works the grill at Jim’s, the business her family owns. “A lot of people, they get a big head. But he hasn’t changed.”

For some athletes, paeans to modesty and hometown roots have become the stuff of cynical sound bites and Twitter feeds. But for Trout, those values are part of the air he breathes. And that air is a lot fresher in Millville.

“When I’m with him, I don’t even think we talk about baseball,” says Bobby Fabrizi, one of Trout’s closest friends and a budding mixed-martial-arts fighter who was a baseball teammate beginning in grade school. “We just hang out like we would have in high school.

“For me, it ain’t nothing different than like it was.”

However, in Millville almost everything is different than it was. The last of the Wheaton and Kerr glass factories, which once ran three shifts a day, closed in the early 1990s, shortly after Trout was born. The town lost rubber and manufacturing jobs, too, and now unemployment in Cumberland County is 13.9%, nearly double the national rate.

“If you polled true Millville people, they wouldn’t mind going back to those times when people didn’t have to worry about their next paycheck,” Shannon says. “We were a hustling, bustling manufacturing town. And life was pretty good.”

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Life is still pretty good for Mike Trout. Unlike Millville, Trout has never struggled.

Well, almost never.

“When he was a freshman, for about three days,” remembers Roy Hallenbeck, Trout’s baseball coach at Millville.

There was also his first brief stay in the majors, in July 2011, when he batted .163 with more strikeouts (10) than hits (seven) in 14 games. Trout looked very much like what he was — an overmatched teenager playing in the big leagues for the first time — but he responded to the adversity by doing something very few teenagers do: reapplying himself.

When he was called back to the majors in August, two weeks after his 20th birthday, he hit .406 in his first 11 games.

That was a lesson learned. But the turning point for Trout, when he made the massive jump from promise to production, took place last spring, his father says.

Trout had come to Arizona expecting to compete for an everyday job. Instead, he sat out most of spring training, first with a sore shoulder and then after losing 15 pounds because of a viral infection that left him weak and drawn.

“He was at maybe his lowest point in pro ball,” Jeff Trout says.

Jeff and his wife Debbie were about to board a plane to Phoenix to comfort him when they had second thoughts.

“One of the best parenting decisions we ever made was we didn’t go,” Jeff says. “Deb and I debated it and said that, you know what, this is a time he needs to figure it out on his own. He doesn’t need mommy and daddy out there.”

Left to his own devices, Trout recovered quickly. He started the season in triple A ball, but by the end of April was back with the Angels. Six months later, he was a unanimous choice as the AL rookie of the year.

“I think he understands that the game is a humbling game and there’s a lot of ups and downs; there’s a lot of failure,” says Jeff, who retired last week after 25 years as a history teacher at Millville High.

Around Millville, friends expect Trout to remain humble no matter how successful he becomes.

“He is something different. He is a throwback, there’s no question about it,” Mayor Shannon says. “What I’m probably more proud of with Mike is his modesty. His character.

“He understands he’s a man playing a kid’s game. He’s doing what he’s wanted to do all his life. And loving it.”

kevin.baxter@latimes.com

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