I'm not sure what might have occasioned this, but The New Yorker's Ben McGrath just wrote a fine précis about baseball's current popularity (national vs. local) and the whole face-of-baseball thing (although he's of course too eloquent to use that hoary term). Ben's first graf is quite lovely:
If Mike Trout walked into your neighborhood bar, would you recognize him? Let me rephrase: If the baseball player who is widely considered the best in the worldâa once-in-a-generation talent, the greatest outfielder since Barry Bonds, the most accomplished twenty-two-year-old that the activity formerly known as the national pastime has ever knownâbent elbows over a stool and ordered an I.P.A., would anyone notice? A few weeks ago, Trout, who plays center field for the Angels, hit a ball nearly five hundred feet. At the All-Star Game, he was clocked at twenty miles per hourârounding the bases, on foot. Yet his Q rating is about on par with that of Jim, the guy in South Jersey whose burgers Troutâs mother sometimes mails, frozen, to her superhuman son in Anaheim, to keep him rooted in the tastes and comforts of home. The pride of Millville: a chubby-cheeked mamaâs boy with a haircut certified by the Marine Corps. He strides among us like a colossus, anonymous.
First, it's early. If Trout were working on his third Most Valuable Player Award rather than his first, this might be a somewhat different story. If the Angels had won a World Series with Trout in the lineup, this might be a somewhat different story. Being the best baseball player in the world has never been a guarantee of anything, and in fact many of the most famous baseball players weren't actually the best. Not since Babe Ruth, anyway.
As I've written before, I think the most famous baseball player after Jeter's gone might be Trout -- this October might tell that tale, at least in the short term -- but it might instead be someone with a little more personality. Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson were rarely the best, but you couldn't stop watching them. In today's corporate baseball, granted, there's less room for personality. But I have little doubt that within two or three years, you'll walk into a bar and recognize that world-famous baseball player nursing his Bud Light.
