Jose Bautista is Trying Way Too Hard to Win this Face of MLB Twitter Contest

Jose Bautista desperately wants to win the “Face of MLB” Twitter contest that’s been going on for the last couple weeks.  (Spoiler: Derek Jeter is going to win, sorry Joey Bats.)

The Blue Jays outfielder is going out of his way on Twitter to cultivate votes, basically begging people for retweets by offering that he’ll follow them back in return. Usually this works the other way around, a regular person begs a celebrity or athlete for a birthday retweet for some sense of cosmic validation to their otherwise unremarkable lives.

A famous person appealing to the masses the other way around is kind of sad to watch from afar. Here’s but a smattering of Bautista’s tweets from Friday morning as he stumps for votes:

As of Friday morning Bautista is following over 170,000 people on Twitter. Call it a guess, but he’s probably not going to read all your tweets about the latest episode of Girls after he follows you.

Bautista is a solid, All-Star level player and maybe a guy to target if he slips in a fantasy draft, but labeling him the “Face of MLB” (whatever that nebulous term might mean) is a bit of a stretch. Again, when the contest is over it’s going to end up with Jeter winning by a landslide, unless Bautista is able to mobilize the entire population of Canada. (35 million people live in Canada, while about 8.5 million live in New York City.)

On the plus side, all of Bautista’s cloying for votes probably means he saw that picture of a sad-looking Vladimir Putin show up about 100,000 times in his feed the other day. So he’s already a winner.