CLEVELAND -- Christian Yelich shares more in common with Mookie Betts than an MVP Award.
The defending NL MVP is also a five-tool threat with a Gold Glove and batting title on his resume. Like Betts, he arrived in the big leagues as a skinny doubles hitter (albeit one standing 6-foot-3) who eventually developed legitimate power.
Where the two diverge is how they've followed up their MVP seasons. While both are All-Stars, only Yelich can say he has improved upon last year, when he led the Brewers to Game 7 of the NLCS by hitting .326 with 36 homers and 110 RBIs.
This year, he has been even better, with .329-31-67-1.140 numbers, which stand in marked contrast to Betts' solid-but-not-spectacular .272-13-40-.859 production.
So what does Yelich think of Betts' performance thus far?
"I got to know him over the course of last year," he said at All-Star media day. "He's an amazing player. I love watching him play. He can do everything. He really can, on both sides of the ball. He's unbelievable defensively, his talent on the offensive side is pretty well documented. It's definitely impressive."
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Yelich said the hardest part of the post-MVP experience was deciding how to prioritize his time.
"The thing that comes with the MVP, it's a different offseason," he said. "There's a lot of demands on your time. You're definitely busy. It takes you out of your comfort zone and offseason routine. You don't really get to prepare for the upcoming season the way you would have before, and you couple that with (the Red Sox) winning the World Series, and everything that goes along with that, and it's not easy."
With a newborn baby at home, Betts turned down marketing opportunities and interview requests over the offseason and during spring training. Yelich took a different approach.
"It's all what you can handle," he said. "Everyone has different things going on in their lives. The way I looked at it was I wanted to keep baseball first, my preparation for the season first. I felt like I owed that to my teammates, the organization, everybody else that was putting in work for the upcoming year. And anything I could handle after that, I did. I wanted to experience it and I think life is about experiences. When you win an award like that, there's a lot of doors that are open to you. If I had time to do something I did it."
Betts and his Red Sox teammates have noted the bullseye that comes with the MVP award, and Yelich knows that feeling, too. He suspects that Betts will break out in the second half on talent alone.
"He's still having a great season -- he's here," Yelich said. "Maybe it's not up to his standards of an MVP level, but I think when this thing's all said and done, by the time the season's over, he's going to be right where he needs to be."
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