Baltimore Orioles: Who Is Ryan Mountcastle?
If you ask the average baseball fan who Wander Franco is, they would most likely tell you that he is Tampa Bay Rays’ young star. If you ask that same average fan who Ryan Mountcastle is, they most likely will shrug their shoulders and ask for the next question as the Baltimore Orioles youngster toils in relative anonymity.
Recently I held a small poll in my town by going around asking people three simple questions. However, I did not want to know which team or teams they were fans of to keep it as neutral as I possibly could.
1. Are you a baseball fan?
2. Do you know who Wander Franco is?
3. Do you know who Ryan Mountcastle is?
Baltimore Orioles young star Ryan Mountcastle remains relatively unknown
When asking these questions, if someone said they were not a fan of baseball, I would simply move on to the next person. For about two hours, I went around asking various people these questions and the results were exactly what I expected.
Out of 54 people who identified as baseball fans, 46 of them knew who Wander Franco was. Meanwhile, 31 were unfamiliar with Ryan Mountcastle. That equates to 57.4% of people living in the Northeast that do not know the Orioles’ young star.
In most cases, you can just chalk scenarios such as this up to a team’s market size or visibility. That is why I used Wander Franco as my example since the Rays are not exactly a big market team. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine being a baseball fan and not knowing a player who, in their first full season, hit 33 homers, drove in 89 runs, and finished sixth in the AL Rookie of the Year vote.
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It is possible that many of these “fans” were not really fans at all and maybe my sample size was too small. Regardless, I found this to be a very interesting story to write about. Let’s hope that Mountcastle can continue his hot start to the 2022 season so that the Baltimore Orioles youngster can get the recognition he deserves.