NEW YORK After Wrestlemania, the biggest event of the year in WWE is SummerSlam, which takes place Sunday night in Brooklyn. As part of the buildup, wrestlers Enzo Amore, Big Ca s, Charlotte, Mark Henry and Big Show were in the Bronx on Tuesday, wearing customized jerseys and caps as they got a look at Yankee Stadium.

Growing up in North Jersey, I was a huge Yankees fan, Amore told Sporting News. Got a family full of Yankees fans, die hard. I grew up a huge fan of Derek Jeter. Nonethele s, Ive probably over the last 10 years lost touch with the current affairs of baseball. Our schedule is so demanding, its hard for us to, what is it, 162 games a season, its hard to keep up with whats going on in the current state of MLB.

That is understandable, because WWE is on tour all year long. Likewise, baseball players are traveling all the time from late winter until early fall, so having old favorites and not being as much in touch with whats going on now goes the other way, too

My favorite pa sed away, Ultimate Warrior, Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips said. It was a sad day for me, man. It really was a sad day for me and my brother and all of my friends, we were really into the old school wrestling even before NWO, all that kind of stuff. I follow it every once in a while now, especially being busy, being a new father and stuff like that.

Though the worlds of MLB and WWE may not intersect all that often, there is a heavy Saquon Barkley Jerseys overlap between baseball fans and wrestling fans, enough to make you wonder a bit about why that is. The differences between live sports and sports entertainment are obvious, but what similarities might there be? And, as far as baseball is concerned, what le sons might be learned from a pastime that does so well at connecting with a young audience?

Ill give you one very keen example, Amore said. Every once in a while, you go out there on WWE TV and you hit what I call a home run. And every once in a while, you step up to the plate on the diamond, and you hit a home run.

A home run in wrestling would be tearing the house down with a particularly strong promo, match or even a finishing move. The result is the same Sterling Shepard Jerseys as in baseball: the crowd goes wild for it.

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Wrestling and baseball are totally different, but were all entertainers, Phillips said. Weve got to entertain the fans, because they pay a lot of money to come watch us play. If we dont do our jobs, then the fans dont get their moneys worth.

Entertaining the fans is not as simple as going out and playing the game, at least not always. There has been a lot of debate in the past few years in baseball about playing the game in a steely, Jeterian fashion (oddly enough, pretty much the opposite of Amores brash character) and wearing your heart on your sleeve, or showboating, depending who you ask about it. Its the latter that tends to resonate more with a younger demographic, but it does not have to mean doing things that rub opponents the wrong way. Just showing a more human side with real emotion can be a way to make the connection.

The entertainment part of wrestling being entertaining, the attitude, being creative, having fun baseball is a wonderful game and the challenges of it are a story and a drama in and of itself throughout a season, said Hunter Pence, who is not a wrestling fan, but popularized Daniel Bryans Yes chant with the 2014 Giants because he had seen it at the Rose Bowl and loved it he never saw Bryan in the ring. But its also fun to have a little personality and enjoy that for each of the players. Theyre different, but there is some cool, inspiring things that come from wrestling for all of us.

Having personality and doing cool, inspiring things was at the heart of Bryce Harpers Make Baseball Fun Again platform this spring. At times, the reigning National League MVP veers even further into a wrestling kind of template.

The need to involve the fans is more important than ever, not only because of the crowded sports and entertainment landscape, but because of the changes that have happened in the way fans connect with sports. Its no longer a one-way street.

The Attitude Era in the late 90s was the real kicker to get me into (wrestling), and that spilled into the millennium, Orioles center fielder Adam Jones said. It was the personalities that drew us, and todays sports, with social media, Snapchat, all the things, the modern fan can connect either watching video from their favorite athletes, read the posts, and feel like theyre a part of it somehow, some way. From that fan perspective, theyre along for the ride with you. You can tweet somebody and they can see it and might want to get back to you. Ten years ago, the only way you could reach out to somebody was to go to the ballpark. Now, you New York Giants Jackets dont even have to do that.

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As some players, and many of the rest of us, have discovered, social media allows you to define your public persona in a way that might be very different from who you are in private. For an athlete, this is really the creation of a third form of self, because the person on the field can also be completely different. Thats something wrestlers are plenty familiar with, as well.

"I just be me, Phillips said. I let people make the decision for me. I approach baseball, I approach my fans, I approach the world the best way I know how, and let people put me in their own little box. I can be totally different people. Im Brandon Phillips and Im Dat Dude. It just depends on the day.

Some of Phillips days are at home and some are on the road, a difference from wrestling, where there are no hometown fans for a touring company. That makes the babyface/heel dynamic trickier to nail down, but it does exist in baseball, perhaps exacerbated, again, by more wide-ranging dynamics.

I think theres a lot of players that like being a bad guy, Jones said. Being the bad guy is pretty cool. The arch-villain. Why not? When you have everybody like you, thats a problem. You need some people that cant stand your presence. Thats what I think. Even your own fans can be against you! Heres the difference. In todays sports world, fantasy sports have made fans, in certain aspects, different. You dont go out and go 4-for-4, you aint helping your fantasy team. Your team couldve won, and they dont give a crap about that. They want their fantasy points. Its changed the level of thinking in sports, and we just go with it.

Pence, on the other hand, has no interest in playing the heel. Thats not really my personality, he said. Even if you dont like me, I respond with love and kindne s.

Somewhere in between those roles, baseball just said goodbye to the man who might have been the WWE-est player weve ever seen, a fully-formed character who was supremely talented, wanted so desperately to be popular that he cheated, and only after hitting rock bottom, found in his final act a measure of the love Daniel Jones Jerseys he had sought.

Theres definitely a connection, especially with a guy like A-Rod, such a polarizing figure, Big Ca s said. When he came into the Yankees, huge babyface, and then during the postseason, a few years after his debut with the Yankees, he caught some heat from the fans and the media. In 2009, he turned that back around when he put the team on his back, pretty much, and led them to the World Series I would say he was the main catalyst of that World Series year. Subsequent years, following that, he became maybe the biggest heel in the company, being the New York Yankees organization, and then on his farewell tour over the past year, turned it back around with the fans, they got back on his side. Thats good booking!"