Aaron Judge is awesome, but enough with the ‘Face of Baseball’ nonsense already

So I haven’t squawked in quite a while. I’ve been very busy with real-life things, including running the New Jersey Marathon in April, doing a sprint triathlon in June, participating in the NYC Triathlon this weekend, and doing a Tough Mudder later on this month. I haven’t been able to watch as many Yankee games as I used to because of my training. But I have gotten to see some games.

Anyhow, like most Yankee fans, I’m very excited over the court of Aaron Judge. (And the Yankees setting up that Judge’s Chambers section for fans is genius, even if it might be a little too soon — one of the best ideas they’ve had in years!) He is a bona fide star and his every at-bat is becoming an event. And as a fellow tall person, I love that he’s six feet seven. He also seems to be a very level-headed guy. And that Home Run Derby performance was jaw-dropping. The announcers should have just shut up and let his bat do the talking, it was so amazing.

So what’s not to love? All the “face of baseball” hype. Because the New York City media loves to come up with dumb things like this (another annoying one was that whole “Core Four” nickname, rewriting Yankee dynasty history), they love singling out one player as the so-called face of baseball, something they last did with Derek Jeter. What does it mean, anyway? Do we talk about the face of football or the face of basketball? No. It’s only in baseball that media members (and some fans) want to sum up 700 players into one person.

Even MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred talked about Judge being the new face of baseball, although if you watch the interview with ESPN where they were pushing this theme, he also says that there are a number of players representing the game.

Can we just enjoy Judge without having to label him with such sweeping pronouncements? Let’s let him finish an entire season or two first before putting such pressure on him. At any rate, why does one person have to represent the game, anyway? It’s exciting that there is so much new blood in MLB these days, as evidenced by the many players at the All-Star Game for the first time. Let’s just have fun watching Judge and the rest before singling anybody out as the face of baseball.