'He thought for a second - and he was dead serious - and he said, 'Mickey Mantle-type ability.' And that's breathtaking. 'I said, 'Compare him to somebody,'' Selig recalled. Heck, even the commissioner, good old Bud Selig, found himself telling a story recently of how he asked a longtime scout friend about the legend of Trout. It's about the future of the game.'Īnd inside baseball's inner sanctum, there's nothing they root for harder than for Mike Trout to BE the future of their game. 'But if Mike Trout does something that becomes an All-Star moment, it's not a career-reflection moment. 'Derek Jeter is going to have an All-Star moment, but it's going to be more of a career-reflection moment,' said Bill Sutton, one of America's brightest sports-marketing minds, and the director of the Sports and Entertainment Management MBA program at the University of South Florida. A night with the potential to make us reflect on where he's going - for about the next two decades - and on where he might be taking this whole sport along with him. So why can't this be Trout's night, too? A night to put his stamp on a special All-Star Game. The more we see of him, the more we get to know him, the more it feels as if he rolled into baseball out of the pages of a W.P. Clayton Kershaw.īut who is better positioned to grab that torch and not let go than Mike Trout? Mike Trout eventually wants what his boyhood idol, Derek Jeter, has - championship rings. You could make a case for that torch landing in the grasp of many players who will join him on that field Tuesday night: Andrew McCutchen. But as Jeter waves goodbye, he has a torch to pass. It's a night to reflect on the starlit road Jeter has traveled. This is the night, this is the time, this is the place where their paths diverge. But don't let those similarities confuse you. They will wear the same uniform, dress in the same clubhouse, find themselves on the same lineup card. It will be Derek Jeter's final All-Star Game. MINNEAPOLIS - On Tuesday night, under the sparkling Minnesota sky, they will play baseball on the same diamond, very likely for the last time.

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