Hello and welcome to the Road to Wire Fantasy Baseball podcast. My name is Chris Crawford. I am joined by my buddy Drew Silva. Today's show, we're going to be looking at hitter category. We're going to take a look at some sneaky, may not be the right words, but maybe some unheralded players that can help you in the major categories. But before we get into that, let's get into some headlines.

And we got some good news about literally one of the greatest players to ever play the game.

Mike Trout began hitting against a pitching machine on Friday.

Trout's just only going to face machine thrown breaking balls initially.

But then he's going to advance the high velocity stuff, work his way back.

Of course, he has missed a bunch of time with this hamlet bone fracture out since early July.

They're hoping that they can put a ATA on things based on how things are going, which I think is a positive sign.

He was playing really well prior to this as well.

So this would be a wonderful thing to see,

Drew, I just want to see Mike Trout playing baseball games. Yeah, just those machine thrown

breaking balls for now. The robots are taking over, Chris. I mean, there's no,

they're kind of like the angels are kind of shying away from

putting an exact timetable on this.

But they've said once he is able to hit against contact, you know, once he's able to take

contact swings and, you know, they turn the velocity up on the pitching machine and he can

face fastballs and his surgically repaired wrist responds well to all that.'s it's going to be go time it'll be a quick process from

there maybe a little minor league rehab stint or the angels could just bring them right back if

the simulated at bats go smoothly um either way yeah once he is discomfort free with those contact

swings it's going to be a swift process.

So maybe, I would say, best-case scenario, he returns next weekend.

That seems like a reasonable best-case scenario, given what we know.

And, man, the angels could sure use him.

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