If you haven’t been following the story of Los Angles Angels rookie Mike Trout this season, here’s the gist: he’s everything you want to like about Bryce Harper without all the things you hate about Bryce Harper.

Via AOL FanHouse:

[J.J.] Hardy thought he had his 12th home run of the season in the bottom of the first inning after he drove Jered Weaver’s breaking ball to deep right-center field. Trout ran all the way back to the warning track, leaped up and snagged the ball over his head before it landed beyond the fence. Trout hit the wall, landed on his feet and may have been more excited than Angels fans watching.

“Now that is Torii Hunter, circa 2002 against Barry Bonds in the All-Star Game,” the Angels announcer said as Trout celebrated the highlight.

Because they called it out by name, here’s that very Bonds clip for your comparing/contrasting needs:

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Happy Memorial Day, everybody.

It’s the last Monday in May, so that means we’re taking a relaxed schedule and spending our day remembering the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. Swimming pools and food are involved. We’re still going to be posting stuff today but we don’t expect you to read it, so if it’s just a pic of Kate Upton with ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES BRANDON A DULL BOY under it we hope you’ll understand.

Go outside today! Take your iPad with you and constantly refresh With Leather, but do it outside.

Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers has hit six home runs in the series against the Baltimore Orioles, including Tuesday’s game wherein he became only the sixth player in the history of the American League to hit four homers in a single game. He went 5-for-5 and drove in eight runs, four of which were Elvis Andrus and four of which were himself. Believe it or not, that’s not the highlight for me.

I grew up in Virginia as an O’s fan (before moving to Cleveland and discovering how much more fun perennial losing is when it’s racist), so the coolest and most mythic thing you can do at Oriole Park in Camden Yards is bank a ball off the B&O Warehouse in right. Ken Griffey Jr. did it during the 1993 Home Run Derby. I’ve sworn for years that I saw Pete Incaviglia do it once during batting practice, but I can’t verify it.

During Thursday’s game, Josh Hamilton hit the warehouse. Not only that, he hit a window on the second floor of it. Excuse me as I revert back to 13-year old me and say, “holy sh*t”. Video is below.

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He’s not technically a Baltimore Oriole anymore, but when the O’s disassociate themselves from you you’re an Oriole until proven otherwise. From an AP report:

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) Former major leaguer Vladimir Guerrero said he has surrendered to police after authorities contend he attacked a police officer in a disco. Guerrero denied being part of an attack.

Police said no charges have been filed against Guerrero following the mayhem in Nizao, about 40 miles from Santo Domingo.

Maximo Baez Aybar, a spokesman for the police in the Dominican Republic, maintained Guerrero “physically attacked” police officer Renato Pena Rojas after a brawl broke out in the disco. Baez Aybar asked that Guerrero turn himself in “so the case can be put in the hands of the justice system.”

Thanks to chatroom technology we can jump to the moment of the arrest and find out exactly what happened, pending my ability to remember Spanish. Today’s Opening Days Dugout (which was originally just the above picture with FLAGGERERRO written at the bottom) is after the jump.

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Welcome to our newest column at With Leather, the Orioles Report! In the Report, we’ll be following along with the Birds’ 2012 season and chronicling the unique, exciting things that happen when the O’s take the field! NOTE: NO BASEBALL WILL BE FEATURED

Today’s episode, wherein an elderly woman sitting in the crowd holds a bat longer than Ryan Flaherty, from Holdout Sports:

It happened in the bottom of the second inning at the Phillies’ spring training stadium in Clearwater, Florida. Ruiz’ bat slipped out of his hands as he swung, and the bat landed just to the right of the woman, who may have been the oldest woman in that section of the park, but obviously still has enough reflexes to react and grab the bat.

(video via MLB.com)

Come for the standing ovation they give a lady for touching a bat from her seat, stay for the slow motion replay where Carlos Ruiz loses control of his bat and the section behind him does an involuntary point-wave.

Next week on the Orioles Report: the Oriole Bird accidentally hits a guy in the face with a hot dog, then eats the hot dog.

In a story TMZ.com is calling an exclusive because someone paid them to write about it, Anna Benson, wife of former New York Mets Baltimore Orioles pitcher Kris Benson, shocked and upset producers of ‘Baseball Wives’, a reality show debuting tonight, when she threatened Chuck Knoblauch’s wife with a stun gun and a 12-inch dildo she’d produced from her purse. I find three things wrong with this news blurb:

1. There is no way somebody married Chuck Knoblauch.

2. Who tries to threaten somebody with a dildo, and furthermore, what kind of porno-ready Magic Murder Bag is Anna Benson carrying around where she can comfortably transport and whip out a 12-inch dong? My girlfriend barely has enough room in her purse for my keys.

3. Shouldn’t your husband have to be playing baseball to make you a “baseball wife”? I think I’ve started more Major League games in the last five years than Kris Benson.

Anyway, if “reality show person shocks reality show people with reality show behavior” wasn’t enough to clue you in, TMZ’s finishing line of

Sources tell us … show execs are trying to contain Anna.

should be enough to tip you off to the bullsh*t. I don’t know what’s funnier, the idea of Baseball Wives producers trying to wrangle a terrible baseball player’s gold-digging stripper wife in a circus cage to maintain the integrity of their Celebreality fame-whore Thunderdome or TMZ’s use of ellipses making it read like they’re on the end of a 1950s newswire with bated breath, breaking the sentence up into fragments to get us the news as fast as possible. BREAKING NEWS, STOP. BASEBALL WIVES DRAMA, STOP. CHUCK KNOBLAUCH’S MOTHER-WIFE STRUCK BY PHALLUS, STOP.

You can check out ‘Baseball Wives’ tonight on VH1, or even better, you can’t.