Trout dropped in the '09 Draft because of rain?

Full Account -- a new podcast from MLB.com that will provide deep dives on baseball’s best stories -- is releasing a series of episodes this week about the vast impact of the 2009 MLB Draft. One of the episodes delves into how Mike Trout ended up going to the Angels with the 25th overall pick. What follows is a small sampling of Trout’s story. You can subscribe to Full Account here or wherever you get your podcasts.

If it hadn’t rained on an island, Mike Trout might have wound up in the desert.

The tale of how Trout didn’t end up with the D-backs is one of many wallowing what-ifs and frustrated face palms that dot the future Hall of Famer’s origin story. When the 17-year-old kid who goes on to become the greatest in the game gets passed over by 21 teams in the Draft, there are a lot of people left ruing The One Who Got Away. Plenty of general managers, scouting directors and scouts can tell you their sob story about how they were this close to taking Trout, how he was second on their board behind whatever bust they wound up selecting, yada, yada, yada.

But Tom Allison’s story perhaps best captures how small twists of fate in the lead-up to the Draft allowed Trout to fall to the Angels at No. 25 overall.

? Listen to the Mike Trout episode

If any team was in good position to pick Trout in that first round, it was Allison’s D-backs. Allison, who is now the vice president of scouting for the Mariners, was then the scouting director for an Arizona club that, thanks to a compensation pick granted by the Dodgers’ signing of free-agent Orlando Hudson the previous winter, had back-to-back selections at Nos. 16 and 17.

Allison’s plan was to go with a high-upside high school player with one of those two picks and a more seasoned college player with the other. He had received enthusiastic reports on Trout from scouts Shawn Barton and Matt Merullo. Arizona also had a pro scout named Joe Bohringer who had attended Millville (N.J.) Senior High School, aka Trout’s high school.

The D-backs, therefore, knew Trout about as well as anybody, the Angels included.

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And when Allison himself saw Trout in a game in the spring of 2009, he understood the appeal. Trout could flat-out fly, busting it out of the right-handed batter’s box and down the first-base line in less than four seconds. He was built like a football safety, but he showed good agility in center field. And he had some bang with the bat (even if some scouts asked to take a look at him from the left-hand side to see if his speed would be better-utilized as a switch-hitter, a thought that looks utterly ridiculous now that Trout has become one of the most productive offensive players the game has ever seen).

In that first look, Allison saw Trout at his best and loved it.

“I’m way in on the athlete,” he remembers thinking, “way in on the run, and he’s got some power.”

Allison went so far as to confer with Trout’s representative, Craig Landis, about what kind of signing bonus it would take to sign Trout if he were selected at No. 16 or 17. And that conversation made it clear that Trout, who had committed to East Carolina (the fact that Trout had not committed to a more renowned collegiate program shows that it wasn’t just the pro scouts who whiffed on him), was ready to go pro.

If Allison’s access to Trout had ended there, we might still be talking about how Arizona scored the best Draft haul of all time with Trout and A.J. Pollock (out of Notre Dame) in the first round and Paul Goldschmidt (out of Texas State) in the eighth.

But then, one day in May 2009, it rained.

Not in Millville, but on Long Island, where Steven Matz was scheduled to pitch for Ward Melville High School.

Allison had a connection at the Philly airport on his way to see Matz when he got word from his area scout that Matz’s game was rained out. So, on a whim, he rented a car and drove back down to Millville to get a second look at Trout.

“Maybe, hey, it’s one of those scouting rules,” said Allison, “once you’ve seen a guy, you weigh in, never go back? Well, sure enough, I went back.”

And in what can only be described as a rarity, Trout had a bad game that day.

Suddenly, for Allison, all of the industry biases against Trout -- all the things that would allow him to slide as far as he did -- were fair game. Because of where he grew up, Trout didn’t have many games under his belt. He didn’t face high-caliber pitching. He wrapped his top hand around the bat much the way his father, Jeff, whose professional career tapped out at the Double-A level, once did.

And anyway, how many great players come out of South Jersey?

“Here was a northern state player who was just a little bit more raw in his overall baseball repetitions,” Allison said. “He was just a little bit further behind some of the other players that had more reps under their belts.”

That second look was all it took. Trout fell down the D-backs’ Draft board.

They took Pollock at 17. But with the pick at 16 -- the one Allison was willing to expend on a high-risk, high-reward high schooler -- Arizona took a Fort Myers, Fla., kid named Bobby Borchering, who never set foot in the big leagues.

“You realize how difficult scouting is,” Allison says, “and you try to get multiple looks. But maybe sometimes one look is good enough, because you get everything you need to see from the player, which I did with Mike that first time. But that second time, you go back and you start picking the player apart maybe too much. It is something that I've used as a learning tool moving forward. Very appropriate during this drafting time, sometimes staying objective is very tough when, subjectively, you'd see certain things. So that was a moment I've not only tried to learn from but take and educate those who I get to touch moving forward.”

The D-backs weren’t the only club that “Borchered” the Trout opportunity, and Allison would recover nicely with his selection of Goldschmidt at No. 246 overall -- one of the better late-round finds of all-time and a great tale unto itself.

? Paul Goldschmidt: America's 246th pick

But a decade later, the Trout miss stings. During Trout’s incredible career, we’ve come to learn that he’s a pretty big fan of inclement weather.

Pardon Allison if he doesn’t share that enthusiasm.