DENVER – All-Star is the ideal setting to ask about the Face of Baseball. Obvious? Maybe. And certainly a little hokey, but the whole week is about self-conscious myth-making anyway, giving the sport an identity specific to the current season. Like trying to provide a real-time version of the sort of nostalgia baseball usually takes to the bank.
Plus, it was the first opportunity to talk to many of these players in person since before the pandemic, and if there’s anything All-Stars know, it’s their competition.
Fittingly for a week dominated by the story of his historic triple-threat appearance, many of them said Shohei Ohtani.