TEMPE, Ariz. — Spring training can be monotonous the longer it goes on. It’s long days every day and it can take a mental toll on the players, but the Angels took a mental break for 30 minutes Wednesday morning with the help of a magician.
Shlomo Levinger is a magician with over six thousand subscribers on YouTube and over 19,000 followers on Instagram. The 27-year-old was first connected with the Angels in 2021 when Mike Trout followed him on Instagram and the two direct messaged to plan out a visit. Levinger performed tricks in the parking lot after a game in front of Trout, then Angels outfielders Justin Upton and Dexter Fowler, and then Yankees first baseman Anthony Rizzo. The visit was a success and Levinger posted the video to his YouTube and Instagram, where other MLB players left comments or reached out to him for a visit.
Since then, Levinger met Angels starting pitcher Reid Detmers at former Angels reliever Joe Smith’s charity event a couple of years ago and they have kept in touch since then. Detmers heard Levinger was coming to Arizona this spring and invited him to Angels camp to perform in the clubhouse.
“The whole goal is to give them a little break from the high intensity and anxieties from spring training,” Levinger said. “You want to let them sit and relax and enjoy a really fun show. My show, personally, is a lot of magic and mind-reading. I like for the magic to be strong, but I focus on the lightness of it. I want the guys to laugh and have a good time.”
Levinger’s performance featured numerous tricks, but one that stands out is he drew an “X” on Trout’s palm with a Sharpie and had infield coach Ryan Goins standing nearby with his fists closed. He then peeled the “X” off Trout’s palm and threw it towards Goins, who then opened his hands to show the “X” sitting on his palm in the exact same spot as Trout’s palm.
“I'm sure somebody would be like, ‘I've seen this,’” reliever Michael Peterson said. “I've never seen it, and so my mind was just like, this is witchcraft.”
Another trick that left the clubhouse in awe was when Levinger asked first baseman Nolan Schanuel to think of anything in the world. After Schanuel searched what he was thinking on his phone to show his teammates, Levinger wrote down his guess in a notebook. Levinger flipped around the notebook to show he had written “Brad Pitt,” which was exactly what Schanuel thought of.
“What he does is awesome,” Detmers said. “You're always amazed. I can't catch on to it. I don't know how he does it, but I've seen him do it hundreds of times, and it's something different every time. It blows my mind.”
Levinger followed that by having the guys pass a ball around and name different things when the ball got to them. Someone named pancakes as a food and another named Shaquille O’Neal as a celebrity. Then, they opened the plastic baseball to find a crumbled-up picture of Shaq eating pancakes.
The final act of the day featured Levinger asking multiple players to think of a number. Once they all thought of a number, he multiplied them all together to create a new one. A number that Levinger had already written in an envelope before he even showed up to the clubhouse. As mindblowing as it was that Levinger correctly predicted the number, he took it a step further and used each number to represent the letters of the alphabet and when he did that, it showed that those numbers spell out “LA Angels.”
“Absolute awe, like just blown away,” reliever Garrett McDaniels said. “I thought he was going to go somewhere with it, and then went completely somewhere else, and it was just mind-blowing.”
It’s kind of ironic how in order to take a mental break, the players were subjected to magic tricks that left them mentally confused. But when it’s nearing the end of spring training, doing anything other than baseball goes a long way for the players.
“Obviously spring training is long, it's exhausting to a certain extent, and to show up to the field and have some fun and have somebody show you some magic and some mind stuff, it's pretty cool,” Detmers said. “Just take your mind off baseball for a little bit and enjoy the moment and have some fun with the guys.”