John Axford is well aware that his growing popularity likely has as much to do with his award-winning moustache, as it does with his NL-high 46 saves in 2011.
So perhaps that’s why during a recent interview the 28-year-old Milwaukee Brewers closer revealed that when the season ended, his powerful right arm wasn’t the only the part of his body he shut down for the winter.
“Every off-season I shave (my moustache) off,” Axford told Forbes.com. “Just to remind it who’s boss.”
The quotes provide a sense of Axford’s dry wit. The recipient — Forbes.com — is an indication of the type of interest these days in the brand Axford has built around himself — and his upper lip hair — over the past 12 months.
A year ago at this time, the Simcoe, ON native was a Twitter neophyte, having only recently joined the social media network after two years of good-natured pestering by his representatives at Beverly Hills Sports Council.
Twelve months later as he prepared to attend Baseball Canada’s annual awards dinner this past Saturday in Toronto, @johnaxford had over 39,000 followers and 3,121 tweets to his name.
“I didn’t think I was going to like it as much (as I do),” said the co-winner of the 2011 Tip O’Neill Award as the top Canadian player in baseball. “Around this time last year I was still trying to figure it, out but once the season hit, I really grabbed a hold of it.”
Axford — who said he was initially reluctant to sign up for the site because he assumed it was for “self-indulgent” types — added he quickly grew to appreciate how Twitter could help him reveal a different side of his personality than the one people see on the mound.
Tweet a good joke or a funny movie line at him and the Notre Dame film graduate is likely to respond or even better — re-tweet it himself.
Share a good moustache photo with him — especially one on a baby — and it’s likely to end up in his Twitter gallery.
“It’s just a good way to be able to talk to fans,” he said in Toronto on Jan. 14. “Fans can come up to me at games and say that they saw me tweet this or they saw this picture, or that they follow. I really enjoy the Twitterverse, the social media side. Even Facebook.”
This past April, Axford used his space on Mark Zuckerberg’s baby as a way to have fans vote on his 2011 entrance music. In October, he took home the American Moustache Institute’s 2011 Robert Goulet Memorial Mustached American of the Year Award, an ironic twist that was not lost on the Institute.
It was no surprise then that following a successful year on the mound and in the media, Axford was inundated with slew of new endorsement opportunities.
“That’s been one of the biggest things this off-season, just really trying to manage everything that’s coming at you.” he explained while sporting a three-week-old moustache he began growing just after Christmas. “I have a great agency with Beverly Hills sports council, great PR work and guys down there.
“If it seems like a good opportunity they come at me with it, but at the same time you just have to pick and choose and I want to spend time with my family when I can.”
Axford’s guys are “down there”, because he still spends his off-seasons up here in Canada with his wife and eight-month-old son at their home in Ancaster, ON just outside of Hamilton.
“He can order the finest pale ale around, discuss Salvador Dali art and review nearly every movie ever made to boot,” Axford’s agent Dan Horwits told Sports Illustrated earlier this year.
It sounds like a description for the Dos Equis beer man.
So with apologies to the San Francisco Giants’ black-bearded eccentric, Brian Wilson, the title of “The Most Interesting Man in Baseball” belongs to Axford.