You can make an easy argument that Major League Baseball’s marketing efforts have been the weakest of any major sport.

Lacking a primary network affiliation (MLB has split its identity between Fox, NBS and ESPN in recent years) and the considerable video marketing heft that a familiar and exclusive network tie brings, MLB has been left to promote itself on its own.

With an aging former commissioner in Bug Selig and an ownership group that often chooses to focus its marketing efforts with local media tie-ins, “the national game” has limped through several ineffective national marketing campaigns.

Major League Baseball has also deferred to its own perception of itself: the grand old game, passed down generation to generation, a deep nostalgic affair. You can almost smell the mothballs.

All that has changed. The new effort from MLB is unique in that it features no players from the past, no long poetic monologues about chalkboards and marking the time, Ray…these ads are about the now, the current (and fantastic) crop of players who have breathed life into the game. Notice I didn’t say “stars”. MLB is intent on treating baseball as a collective of “the best 750 players in the world, the best the world has to offer”, a wise move in a sport that remains deeply regional and multicultural.

Take a look for yourself:

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This ad in the series features the plain-spoken, straight-shooting Buck Showalter. The Baltimore Orioles manager has developed a reputation as an outstanding judge and developer of young talent while rebuilding the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks into recent World Series-winning organizations. He is now amid a turnaround of the Orioles. He is the closest thing modern baseball has to a wise sage, and he is having none of this talk about the “good old days”. Those days, as Showalter narrates, are now.

Here is another featuring one of the game’s brightest talents, Mike Trout of the Anaheim Angels, but the real focus is the fan experience:

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The campaign is the work of agency Anomaly, which recently won the creative account. The campaign will be updated all season, up to three times weekly. This will allow developing events, such as a remarkable game or no-hitter for example, to be incorporated into the ad stream immediately. Content will appear across all media.

I love baseball. I’ve never understood why baseball always chose to blur its great talent through the grey lens of the past. It always came off as corny, or irrelevant, or lazy. Finally baseball has a campaign that represents the honest truth: these players are really good.