What if Mike Trout doesn’t want to be the face of baseball?

Mike Trout is the best baseball player to come along in quite some time, but what if he doesn’t want to be the face of the game?

Who is the face of Major League Baseball? On the surface, that appears to be a very simple, straight-forward question. It’s the best player, Mike Trout, right?

That’s how it works in other sports leagues like the NBA and NFL where LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Tom Brady drive national marketing campaigns, ratings, and attendance. In the MLB, however, it’s a little different. Baseball’s identity crisis has reached peak levels.

ESPN’s senior MLB writer, Jayson Stark, worked with Luker on Trends to identify America’s 50 favorite pro athletes. The highest active baseball player was Anthony Rizzo, checking in at 51. Derek Jeter, retired two seasons ago, Babe Ruth, dead, and Pete Rose, banned for life, were the three baseball players to appear in the top 50. Depending on who you ask, that’s a big problem for a league that is viewed as a poor marketer of its stars.

By the time he was wrapping up his age-25 season, LeBron had already won two MVPs and taken over the NBA. Easily identifiable by millions all over the world by a single name, LeBron was the face of basketball, playing in his first Finals at the age of 23. Entering his age-25 season, Trout has already won two MVPs, five Silver Sluggers, but has never won a postseason series. Millions of people all over the world would not be able to pick him out of a police lineup.

Can Trout change that? There’s a much better question, one that is hard to answer. Does he even want to?

The Millville Meteor

To understand Trout, you must first understand where he came from. Millvile, NJ is a small farming community in south-central New Jersey. The town of fewer than 30,000 people more closely resembles Amish Country of Central Pennsylvania or Lower Slower Delaware than the bustling, overcrowded North Jersey next to New York City. It’s a simple town, with a main street lined with shops and diners that have been there for decades. What the citizens of Millvile lack in urbane sophistication, they more than make up for with down-to-earth friendliness.

Millville is still where Trout makes his home, and the town itself and its eternal place in the All-Star’s heart are at the forefront of an MLB Network documentary titled Mike Trout: Millville to MVP. Trout is still actively involved in the Millville High baseball team, donating $20,000 from his rookie bonus to refurbish the baseball field. Seniors take turns wearing the number-one jersey Trout wore in high school, and the whole team takes the field wearing cleats shipping in by Trout. That’s just Mikey, a regular guy many of the high schoolers know from their local hunting club.

"The love affair between Trout and Millville is the theme of the documentary, which features interviews with waitresses from Jim’s Lunch, Mayor Michael Santiago, and the barber who cuts the superstar’s hair when he’s home from California.“I’ve never seen a town so much ‘in’ the guy like Millville is ‘in’ Mike Trout,” MLB producer Marc Caiafa said before the screening Thursday night."

Never forgetting your roots or where you came from is a common trope in professional sports that gets trotted out whenever an athlete wants to pay lip service to the people and town that raised them, but this is not some sort of concocted image with Trout. He really does go back to Millville every winter to work out, hit, eat burgers with special sauce at Jim’s Lunch, and hunt with the locals.

Apparently, that’s not good enough for everyone.

"That’s a source of enough frustration inside MLB that, when we brought up his name to one baseball official, he grumbled, “Mike Trout doesn’t leave Orange County or Millville.”"

There’s plenty of truth to that sentiment. Trout has turned down the Home Run Derby, late-night talk show appearances, the World Baseball Classic, and plenty of potential endorsement deals. He was not one of the big-name MLB stars flying around the country over the offseason to promote New Era caps. At the same time, Trout cannot be criticized for doing too little, while other players like Marcus Stroman and Bryce Harper catch heat for showing too much emotion or seeking out the limelight away from the field. Make up your mind.

The closest Trout came to opening up was a joyous appearance on the Weather Channel playing meteorologist and striking up a friendship with quarterback Carson Wentz of the Philadelphia Eagles. When Trout was front and center at Lincoln Financial Field, it was almost strange to see him in the public eye doing something other than put up numbers on par with Mickey Mantle, Alex Rodriguez, Joe DiMaggio, and Frank Robinson.

Trout continues to come along slowly as a “face of baseball,” and that’s perfectly acceptable. He has done more at a younger age than perhaps any player in the history of the sport. He was not groomed for superstardom from a young age. Does he have to desire a broad crossover appeal for himself, though?

For Trout, simply being the best baseball player ever might be enough, and who are we to ask for more? It’s refreshing in many ways that a superstar athlete just wants to ride off into the sunset every offseason, back to his hometown and high school sweetheart, instead of focusing on his #brand.

If not Trout, then who?

Baseball players were the original pitchmen, selling everything from tobacco to cars, soda, cereal, coffee, and beer. Ruth, Mantle, and DiMaggio were known just as much for their exploits and lives off the field than their Hall of Fame credentials, but baseball was different back then. MLB was the only game in town for the first 75 years of its existence. Professional football was still a brutal, niche sport, and basketball was still on the fringes.

The marketing environment for baseball and its stars has changed drastically since the 1950s. Players are paid far more than in the past. Hawking products left and right back in the day was more about supplementing income than building a higher media profile. When Trout signs his 10-year, $500-million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies in a few years (bold prediction alert), will he really need to spend extra time away from his family shooting ads for Coca Cola or Subway?

As a sport, baseball is at a disadvantage when it comes to branding one “face” of the sport. In the NBA, for example, having one of the five-best players on your team all but assures a deep run in the playoffs. Having two top-ten players almost guarantees a trip to the NBA Finals. In the NFL, the best quarterbacks have always seemed to take turns passing the Lombardi back and forth. Trout has yet to win a playoff series in his career, and his team is unlikely to finish higher than fourth this year.

If any single player is going to step up and take over for Jeter as the game’s public face, it may be Noah Syndergaard of the New York Mets. He has the Big Apple Factor working for him, as have most of the past unofficial faces of baseball. Syndergaard also seems very willing to work with the media. He has been on Game of Thrones, has a continuing faux feud with Mr. Met, is an “intern” for Topps, films ads for New Era and Head & Shoulders, and is very buttoned-down on social media. Having the physique and hair of a Norse god certainly won’t hurt him, either. Even so, it’s hard to project Thor as the public face of the league because he plays only once every five days.

If Syndergaard does not step up to the plate, baseball is in a fine place with its many young stars. From Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa in Houston, Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo in Chicago, Bryce Harper and Trea Turner in Washington, Manny Machado in Baltimore, to Mookie Betts and Andrew Benintendi in Boston there are budding superstars under the age of 30 all over the league. They are still finding their footing, and it is still very much a transitional period for baseball away from the Jeter years. While they do that, though, they are fueling massive levels of interest at the team level.

Lest you think baseball is in a bad way with its marketing, think again. MLB has made big strides in the way it showcases the best players and not just the best historical moments. That has been a fair knock on the sport in past years, but no more. Would career backup catcher David Ross have earned a spot on Dancing with the Stars if MLB marketing were not doing its job?

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At the end of the day, it comes down to one thing — Major League Baseball is a $10-billion business that is still growing every year. It does not need a public face to succeed, but it’s far too easy to get caught up in the spin-cycle narrative that the sport is failing. If Mike Trout eventually wants to be that face, good for him. But if not, sit back, watch, and enjoy quite possibly best baseball player of all time doing what he does best.