USA TODAY
It was a friendly non-rivalry turned into what looked like a relatively contrived ad campaign. After all, in baseball, there are no one-on-one matchups between position players, and so Major League Baseball’s decision to pit Cody Bellinger against Christian Yelich, to “run it back,” as the two photogenic lefty sluggers put it, seemed forced, at best.
Except it worked.
Bellinger and Yelich dominated the National League landscape in 2019, pushing themselves and their Los Angeles Dodgers and Milwaukee Brewers to greater heights, more than justifying the 60-second ad and the decision to mic the two up for an inning of the All-Star Game in July.