Pina: Buster Posey: Baseball’s Most Important Player

Are you just going to ignore the 210 lb Giant squatting in America’s living room?

The steroid era is beginning to close—although how can we ever be 100 percent sure—and those famously associated are aging and rapidly mutating into irrelevance. Those who are actually clean—Derek Jeter is 36, Chipper Jones is 38 and after tearing his ACL looks to have played his last inning, and Ken Griffey Jr. already retired, at the age of 40, in June—won’t be around with hard hats and shovels to help in the rebuilding process.

Posey comes into the league at a time when you’d have to be clinically insane to stick HGH, or whatever undetectable cosmetic drug is now new on the market, in your body. The top shelf prospects coming up from this year forward won’t face the same level of scrutiny as the generation before them. The likes of Joe Mauer and Dustin Pedroia should crawl from the rubble unscathed, but they’re in a very small minority. The sport is just beginning to emerge from an incredibly scandalous and damaging decade; players like Posey are exactly what the sport needs—the talented, young, and undoubtedly clean talents.

In a game that values the statistic, these guys are giving MLB executives all the more reason to market them as the new face of the league. They should be in commercials and made household names as quickly as possible. They’re performing on the field, now they need to be in America’s living room.