Mike Trout is an All-Star starter for the 7th straight season.

Not bad!

Not bad for the Millville native, who already has 22 home runs and 57 RBI this year with a 1.082 OPS.

Problem is that Trout is a little boring. He’s a simple dude – baseball, family, Philly sports, etc. He’s not so much about the limelight. To that end, Commissioner Rob Manfred delivered this quote last year about MLB’s best player:

“Player marketing requires one thing, for sure: the player. You cannot market a player passively. You can’t market anything passively. You need people to engage with those to whom are trying to market in order to have effective marketing.”

That resulted in a statement from the Angels and Trout himself, who asked everybody to “move forward,” resulting in the most mundane non-controversy of all time. It was typically MLB.

So today that topic sort of, kind of comes up again with news that Trout has once again declined to participate in the home run derby, via ESPN, after the jump:

“Maybe one year I’ll say to myself, ‘Hey, let’s do it,'” Trout said. “I’m obviously a big fan of watching it. It’s just what it is. I enjoyed watching it as a kid, thought it was cool. I just never really wanted to do it.”

…

It isn’t just MLB and the media that pester Trout about the Derby. It’s friends back home, fans in road cities, even teammates. The Los Angeles Angels‘ star center fielder took part in a home run derby his senior year of high school, winning the event while batting left-handed. He did another as a 17-year-old playing A ball.

As a big leaguer, Trout said he prefers to maximize time with his family during the All-Star break. The workload is also a concern.

“It’s a long, long night,” Trout said. “A lot of swings.”

I mean, look, I get it; if the guy doesn’t wanna do it he doesn’t wanna do it. But I can’t think of anything, off the top of my head, that fans want to see more than baseball’s best player taking part in the home run derby. MLB needs all of the marketing help it can get. It needs a push in the media. It needs superstar players to step out a bit and make themselves visible.

Mike Trout in the home run derby would at least give us a one-day break from non-stop Los Angeles Lakers news taking up 99% of the time on ESPN. We just go straight from the end of the NBA season, through the free agency period, and into the NFL season. Baseball gets some diving catch highlights and that’s basically it for the summer.

C’mon, Mike. Just do it once, for the fans. Do it at Dodger Stadium next season? Please?