Touting Trout:
Why doesn’t the Angels outfielder have nearly the fame of someone like LeBron James or Stephen Curry?
Mike Trout has been the best player in Major League Baseball since the day he broke into the league for good in 2012. He is 25, has won two MVP awards and finished in second place three times. And he plays in one of the world’s biggest media markets.
Trout surpassed 32 Hall of Famers in career wins above replacement (WAR) last season alone, and, at this point, it would stand as an upset if he finishes his playing career anywhere short of inner-inner circle Hall of Fame status. But Trout is almost certainly not the most famous baseball player.
All baseball fans know about Trout by now, of course, but the Los Angeles Angels outfielder hardly registers as a household name like equivalent talents — in that they exist — in basketball and football. Fame isn’t necessarily an easy thing to quantify, but there’s no doubt LeBron James is way more famous than Trout. Stephen Curry is way more famous than Trout. Tom Brady is way more famous than Trout. Rob Gronkowski, Odell Beckham Jr., Carmelo Anthony and Blake Griffin are all likely more famous than Trout.
Although Major League Baseball players dominate any list of the highest-paid athletes in team sports, baseball simply does not breed transcendent superstars at the same rate as the NFL and NBA. And the recent retirements of several of baseball’s biggest names — Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, and Alex Rodriguez — combined with all the hype and hoopla surrounding failed NFL quarterback Tim Tebow’s arrival at New York Mets camp prompt an interesting question: Why aren’t our best ballplayers better known?
We recently used a Twitter poll to determine the active MLB player my followers believe to be the most famous and got more than a hundred responses. Many pointed out, accurately, that Ichiro Suzuki likely ranks as the sport’s best-known player globally. In terms of fame in North America, it’s more difficult to figure, but the most popular answers were the ones we expected: Bryce Harper, Albert Pujols and Justin Verlander. Plenty said Trout. Some people said Clayton Kershaw, some said Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo, some said Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner, some said Miguel Cabrera.
It was hardly a scientific query, so I didn’t bother diving into the data, but I’d guess that, played out over a much larger sample, answers to that question would depend a lot on where respondents live and how closely they follow baseball.
Some seized the opportunity to rail against MLB’s perceived inability to market its young stars, a popular subject of Internet hot takes that’s worth discussing. SO LOGICAL IT’S OBVIOUS MLB is a $10 billion industry that employs a veritable army of smart people. You can contend, based on the evidence available to us, that MLB has not done enough to successfully market its budding superstars at a time the sport features arguably the most impressive crop of young talent in its history. But it’s absurd to suggest or to believe that the league, on some institutional level, has no interest in making a bigger deal out of guys such as Trout.
C’mon. You really think the league doesn’t recognize the importance of minting superstars for its long-term health? You think there’s a single person who works at MLB who doesn’t want Trout to be as big a name as Brady is? It’s not that.
I happen to believe that it’s every baseball fan’s solemn responsibility to do everything in his or her power to spread the gospel of Trout’s greatness and that everyone currently reading this article should put down this issue and begin shouting “Mike Trout!” repeatedly until the name “Mike Trout” itself becomes the world’s most recognizable phrase, as a salutation, an exclamation and an interjection. But beyond even those things about Trout that prevent his greater notoriety — Trout plays for a lousy team, he has never been known to canoodle with celebrities and it’s not clear he has ever had so much as a controversial thought — there are particulars to baseball that make it a more difficult route to widespread stardom than other sports.
Here are three, in no particular order: 1. The schedule: If you read about baseball with any frequency, you will inevitably read at some point about how baseball fails to match football or basketball in terms of national TV rat- ings. But baseball teams play 162 games a year, and all 162 draw eyeballs inside each club’s regional footprint. Following any one baseball team closely during the summer requires something near a full-time commitment, so the sport seems better suited to breeding regional stars than national ones.
Think about it this way: If, say, St. Louis Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright put on street clothes and walked around Times Square or South Beach or Hollywood or Haight-Ashbury or Beacon Hill, how often would he get recognized? How many times would he get stopped for photos or autographs on one stroll down St. Louis’ Delmar Loop? It says here that Wainwright, whom Cardinals fans have watched hundreds of times, gets a Nellylevel reception in St. Louis and
hardly draws a second look most other places, just as Ryan Zimmerman would in D.C. or Paul Goldschmidt would in Phoenix or Eric Hosmer would in Kansas City and so on. We can watch baseball anywhere now, but baseball thrives on local interest, so it fosters local celebrities.
2. The game itself: James has averaged just shy of 39 minutes per game in his NBA career. The last time he played in a game and failed to tally double-digit points was more than a decade ago (and he had nine assists in that game). He has down nights, of course, but he nonetheless factors prominently in every single game he plays. If basketball fans want to see James do James stuff, they can turn on any Cavs game and feel confident it will happen in short order.
Baseball, obviously, doesn’t work like that. Maybe you pack up the car and take the kids out to see Cabrera when the Detroit Tigers come to town, but maybe Cabrera never sees an opportunity with runners on base, or his opponents fail to provide him a decent pitch to drive. Cabrera’s a future Hall of Famer and remains one of the game’s greatest hitters, but he went home hitless in 46 of the 158 games in which he played in 2016.
Given enough chances, Cabrera, of course, will come through. But the difference between a .260 hitter and a .320 hitter is about one extra hit in every 16 at-bats. A casual fan, unfamiliar with the players’ stats or reputations, could conceivably attend and closely watch a full three-game series featuring Cabrera and Jeff Francoeur and leave with little sense whatsoever of who is the better hitter.
Starting pitchers are the exception here, since they play big roles in every outing they make. But they pitch only once every five games. 3. The culture: In a tweet that indirectly inspired this story, baseball writer Jon Bernhardt pointed out that the sport’s traditional culture doesn’t exactly help in the promotion of individual superstars.
He’s not wrong: Baseball players tend to carefully and consciously avoid behavior or words that might make anyone think they’re doing anything beyond all that’s necessary — and only what’s necessary — to help their teams win.
“Help the team win,” in fact, is almost certainly the thing baseball players say most often in public.
To cite one example: Knuckleballer R.A. Dickey enjoyed a dream season for the Mets in 2012.
In the course of that season, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, published a memoir, appeared in a documentary about his signature pitch, won 20 games, earned the NL Cy Young Award and thrilled New York fans and media with his insights on baseball, life and everything else.
But before the Mets traded him to the Toronto Blue Jays after the season, reports surfaced that Dickey’s rise to fame bothered his team and his teammates. From Joel Sherman at the New York
Post in December 2012: “The Mets, meanwhile, have mounting concerns whether all of Dickey’s off-the-field endeavors could impact his on-field results or his standing in the clubhouse if the perception is that he has become too absorbed with his new celebrity.”
Distrust of self-promoters exists in all walks of life, but rarely does it seem more deeply embedded than it does in MLB clubhouses.
The sport’s much-lamented, often-dumb unwritten rules state rather clearly that a ballplayer must respect the game above all else. There are baseball players out there, I guarantee, with personalities far more interesting and far more marketable than what they have to date revealed of themselves publicly, but over a century’s worth of baseball tradition is operating against their instincts to let their freak flags fly.
It’s a shame, really, but — to use another baseball cliche — it is what it is.
It’s not clear that baseball’s relative inability to make people famous is a terribly pressing problem for the sport: MLB, again, is a massively profitable and successful enterprise, and, despite myriad misinformed claims that baseball is dying, baseball is at no real imminent risk of dying.
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The league might benefit, certainly, from having a few more marquee names to drive ticket and merchandise sales and TV ratings, but celebrity in baseball — anecdotally, at least — does not necessarily correlate with regular-season performance as much as it does with chances to play on the sport’s biggest stage in the postseason, with controversy, with massive contracts and with celebrity romances.
People knew Jeter because he helped the New York Yankees win a bunch of World Series and dated a laundry list of famous women. People knew Ortiz because he helped the Boston Red Sox win a bunch of World Series and ultimately became an athlete spokesman for the city of Boston. Rodriguez, indisputably, was a better player than both, but people knew Rodriguez for his reputation as a postseason choker, his massive contracts and his performance-enhancing drug controversies.
Like baseball itself, fame in the sport can be fickle and heavily dependent on circumstance. The importance of developing famous baseball players to the sport’s survival is overstated, and the lack of national or global recognition for Trout’s talents probably rankles Trout’s fans more than it does Trout.
It so happens that a wave of extremely well-known baseball dudes left the game around the same time as a group of extremely promising young baseball dudes entered it. Some members of the sport’s new generation of greats, inevitably, will emerge as superstars in time when fortune allows.
Until then, if this is something you’re invested in for whatever reason, just understand that baseball is simply different from other major sports in a variety of ways that make fame less easily attainable. And do your part:
Mike Trout!