Mike Trout’s cleats, the Trout 4, is Nike’s “most complete data-informed cleat to date.” Thanks to 3-D printing and computational design, the Trout 4 has “a new plate structure that is directly mapped to Trout’s performance data for stability, flexibility, and explosiveness.”
It is not a football cleat, but it certainly has the look, and Nike points to a football cleat, the 2013 Nike Vapor Laser Talon, for the “genesis” of the Trout 4. Like the Talon, and later the Nike Zoom Superfly Flyknit track and field spike, the Trout 4 designers and engineers used 3-D printing and computational design to “dictate stiffness and other performance structures at a level of precision we couldn’t do before,” says Roger Chen, Sr Director, NXT Digital Innovation – Advanced Design at Nike.
“Though very different from baseball, what we learned from each of the other sports directly influenced how we built Trout’s latest cleat,” says Chen. “Specifically, the new cellular language that we created for the track and field plates had the benefits of additional stiffness, but were also lightweight and could be tuned for desired performance.”
A football look with a sprinter’s feel. It also includes hexagonal Zoom Air units placed over pressure points to distribute pressure and provide comfort. That sounds nice.
The Mahi Mahi colorway we see here is special for the All Star Game. You can shop it at the link.
