Earlier this week we began the process to find the Most Interesting Man in Baseball. In Tuesday’s post, we laid out the criteria (have to be active, have to be a player, seeding based on Twitter followers) and met the cast of characters.
For the uninitiated, we settled on eight modern baseball characters: The Cagey Veteran, The On-field Quirk, The Exception to the Rule, The Straight-up Weirdo, The Next Big Thing (?), The Just So Damn Good, The He’s One of Us and Yoenis Cespedes. A representative for each was selected and now we can move on to the good stuff – the matchups.
We didn’t get around to seeding on Tuesday, so here are the official pre-bracket ranks (once again, based on Twitter follows, as taken from Rembert Browne and his “Who Won the Year” articles).
1 Mike Trout: 2.21M followers
2 Yoenis Cespedes: 152K followers
3 Sean Doolittle: 60.8K followers
4 Glen Perkins: 45.4K followers
5 Trea Turner: 21.3K followers
6 Carter Capps: 2,402 followers
7 Ichiro: 315 followers*
8 Shohei Otani: N/A
* I’m not even 100 percent sure this is actually Ichiro’s Twitter account… It’s been inactive since 2011 and is following precisely one other person… Classic Ichiro.
Alright, we now have our seeding and thus our matchups, so let’s get this underway. Today will be the quarterfinals, with the semifinals and finals decided over the weekend.