MLB: Most Interesting Man in Baseball

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Over the course of the past week or so, we have been trying to determine the Most Interesting Man in Baseball. In Part I of our series, we discussed what makes the Most Interesting Man in Baseball much harder to define than Best Player in Baseball and laid out the eight classic characters that fill the major leagues.

There’s 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.

In Part II of our series, we assigned the eight active representatives for each category a seed and began our knockout tournament. (It’s March, there’s no such thing as too many brackets.) We paired our group of eight down to four and set ourselves up for quite the Final Four.

On one side of our bracket, it’s all about talent. We have the best player in baseball pitted against one of the few players in the game with a ceiling anywhere close.

On the other side of our bracket, it’s all about personality. These two gents have plenty of talent, but the intrigue about their off-field nature played just as big a role in their inclusion in the Final Four.

Today, in the final part of our series, we will play out those semifinal matchups, as well as our championship showdown. By the end of this article you will have officially learned who the Most Interesting Man in Baseball is – at least according to this random baseball writer you stumbled upon. That’s the beauty of something as subjective as Most Interesting Man in Baseball, though. It’s sure to start a debate, a debate I hope spills over into the comments and gets people nice and fired up. So what do you say we get this thing started and kick off our first semifinal matchup?

1 Mike Trout vs. 5 Trea Turner

Trout versus Turner presents an interesting case. Not to make this deeper than it needs to be, but where you come down on who is more interesting says a lot about how you react to the world around you. It’s time for your baseball horoscope.

If you find Turner more interesting, you are someone who lives in the now. You are always looking for the next big thing (hey that’s the name of Turner’s character). You are likely at the cutting edge of whatever profession you are in, as you are likely to take the risks to go out on a limb for a client who hasn’t quite proven him/herself but has shown flashes. This need for future edification can have drawbacks (overlooking that amazing talent once it actually blossoms), but you will never be behind the eight ball. You are at the leading edge of all trends and never feel outside the loop.

If you find Trout more interesting, you are more likely to observe life in a historical perspective. You are someone who weighs in-the-moment activity as simply a vehicle for how it will be remembered 100, 200, 300 years down the line. When it is all said and done, will Trout go down as one of the 10 greatest players of all time? One of the top three?!

This is the side of the spectrum where I fall. I was a history major in college, and I have had an obsession with placing people and events in their True Historical Context for as long as I can remember. It just has always been of the utmost importance for me. However, I am not choosing Trout simply because of this personal bias.

In a sense, Trout has just as much “potential” or “ceiling” as Turner, just Trout’s ceiling and potential are in a historical context, and that’s what gives him the edge here. The best parts about Turner can be covered by Trout. Every fun question about Turner can also be asked about Trout, if you just put the words in baseball history at the end of them. When you add in the fact that Trout is the very epitome of realized potential, and the decision becomes very clear. Trout moves on.

3 Sean Doolittle vs. 7 Ichiro Suzuki

Don’t worry, this is not going to be another pseudo-psychology breakdown like our last semifinal. In fact, we’ll keep this one much briefer for one main reason: It’s not actually that close of a matchup.

I’ve made this analogy when I have done previous baseball-related brackets, but it applies once again. You know how in the NCAA tournament we always get extremely excited when the lower seeds (higher seeds? I never know which way to go with this) pull off amazing early-round upsets. We all love when the George Masons of the world make their historic runs. However, when they actually end up in the Final Four, and have to play against a powerhouse like Florida, it becomes very evident that these two teams aren’t really on the same playing field.

That’s the story here. Doolittle is a cool and progressive dude who is one of the best Twitter follows in baseball. Ichiro is a one-name demigod who has more mythology surrounding him than Heracles. Ichiro tosses around Doolittle in this matchup like X-23 tosses around gas station clerks.

We have our final.

1 Mike Trout vs. 7 Ichiro Suzuki

The Just So Good matches up with The Cagey Veteran in our final.

In one corner we have Mike Trout, certified best player in baseball. We gave a few Trout nuggets in Part II of our series, but it’s time to go back to the well and get a few more crazy Trout stats because they are just so many to choose from:

Trout now has two seasons (2012, 2016) in which he was worth as much or more than Ted Williams was worth in the season that the Splendid Splinter hit .406.
Only Barry Bonds has a season with a higher WAR than Trout this millennium.
With just seven steals in 2017 (he’s averaging nearly 30 a season), Trout will join Alex Rodriguez and Darryl Strawberry as the only three to have 150 home runs and 150 steals before their age-26 season.
This next doozy was from an episode of the Effectively Wild podcast which was devoted to digging up the best Trout stats: The only American League players to ever reach 300 total bases, 100 walks and 25 steals in a season are Mike Trout (2016) and Mike Trout (2013).
Finally, as Paul Hembekides stated in his “25 Facts for Mike Trout’s 25th Birthday” article on ESPN, Trout has more hits than Pete Rose did before his 25th birthday; more home runs than Barry Bonds did before his 25th birthday; more runs than Rickey Henderson did before his 25th birthday; and more total bases than Hank Aaron (the all-time leader in TB) did before his 25th birthday.

There’s a decent chance we are watching the greatest human of all time in his field.

In the other corner, we have Ichiro Suzuki, certified OG. Oh and he has plenty of fun stats of his own:

Ichiro began his (MLB) career with ten straight seasons of 200 hits. Only Pete Rose has even ten non-consecutive 200-hit seasons in MLB history.
Once his batting average reached .300 in his 10th at bat of his career, Ichiro’s BA never dropped below .300 again in his career. (Stat from the always awesome @theaceofspaeder.)
Despite not making his MLB debut until the age of 27, only 24 men in MLB history have more hits than Ichiro. And he’s still going strong.

More from Call to the Pen

Ichiro has gone on record saying that he wants to play until the age of 45. That would give him three more seasons, since he won’t turn 45 until after the 2019 season. If we give him 100 hits a season (he has averaged 96 hits/season the last three years), he will end up in the top ten all time. Once again, this coming from a man who spent nine seasons (and collected 1,278 hits) in Japan before coming to America.

I agree with the fact that Pete Rose is still the MLB hit king, but I’m fine with giving Ichiro the honor of a top three pure hitter of all time, a distinction I would not bestow on Rose. (Ty Cobb and Tony Gwynn will fill out my top three.)

It’s not just stats with Ichiro, though. As noted in previous parts of this series, Ichiro is a modern myth maker. Some of these myths live in the ether, like the possibility of Ichiro coming to America at an earlier age and topping Rose, or the idea that Ichiro could actually be one of the best power hitters of all time if he had taken that route.

But my favorite Ichiro myth is one that has been authenticated in recent years. It’s the All-Star Game speech story that I referenced in Part I. Jeff Passan’s 2008 expose on the explosive speeches from Ichiro given at each Midsummer Classic is probably my favorite article of all time, and one that I pull up whenever I am in a bad mood and need a smile. You really should read the whole thing, but here are some of the best clips.

A whisper here. A story there. Something about the greatest pregame speech since Rockne invoked the Gipper, one laced with profanity and delivered to the American League All-Stars every year. “It’s why we win,” David Ortiz said.

A wide grin spread across his face. Ichiro’s secret had been exposed, so, hey, why not have fun with it?

The exact words are not available. Players are too busy laughing to remember them. Ichiro wouldn’t dare repeat them in public. So here’s the best facsimile possible. “Bleep … bleep bleep bleep … National League … bleep … bleep … bleeeeeeeeep … National – bleep bleep bleepbleepbleep!”

The fact that this stayed under wraps for the better part of a decade is truly incredible and just feeds into the myth of Ichiro. The fact that most people who know him say that he can speak and understand far more English than he lets on. The fact that it actually translated into on-field production (the AL was undefeated from 2001-2009) – it’s just all so amazing.

So is that enough to push Ichiro past the incredible and historic pace of Trout?

Yes. As we said at the very outset of this article, this is Most Interesting Man in Baseball not Best Player. Trout wins Best Player in Baseball. He wins it in a landslide. But this is a man who could not be more vanilla if he tried. This is a player about whom a highly-credited ESPN writer felt OK writing the headline “Mike Trout’s real MVP problem? He’s just not that interesting.” That’s brutal, but Jerry Crasnick has a point.

When we speak of the legends of baseball (Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays) half of the fun is discussing their bigger-than-life personalities. It’s part of the reason Hank Aaron is so overlooked by many. He simply showed up, did his job, and went about his life outside of baseball with no flash. As a result, he’s criminally underrated historically. Maybe one day we’ll learn that Mike Trout has secretly been giving epic speeches to the Angels locker room for a decade or that his love for meteorology is really just a ruse to throw us off the scent of his true non-baseball love: private detective work which fills his entire offseason.

Next: Most Interesting Man in Baseball - Part II

But for now, we know nothing of Trout P.I. and as such he has to take the L here.

Ichiro is just too complete a package when it comes to interesting. He has the on-field legend status and the off-field legend status to boot. He truly deserves the title of Most Interesting Man in Baseball.

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