Instead of one Face of MLB, how about eight of them?

In case you haven't heard, the Face of Baseball job just opened up.

No, I'm not talking about David Wright, or even his surprisingly close competitor last season when MLB ran its contest, Eric Sogard.

It's more a general sense that with the retirement of Derek Jeter, Major League Baseball needs to find one guy, one elite player, who can represent the sport the way LeBron James does for the NBA or Peyton Manning does for the NFL.

There are inherent problems with this, however. Unlike basketball, which essentially guarantees that the best player will generally have the ball in his hands at crucial moments, or football, where a quarterback will have the ball in his hands whenever the offense is on the field, baseball spreads at-bats and balls in play democratically.

Moreover, while great players can sometimes get NBA or NFL teams to the postseason largely by themselves, that doesn't happen in baseball. Sure, Jeter was great, but the reason he was omnipresent for two decades in our living rooms was because the New York Yankees as a whole got there.

Accordingly, speculation on who will fill this entirely ceremonial and, if we're being honest, fictional title has centered around two players: Mike Trout and Bryce Harper.

There's a lot of logic to this. Trout has put up numbers essentially nobody else has in baseball history. He plays for a team that just made the postseason, he's in a large market and he turned 23 in August. The worst thing you can say about him is he strikes out a lot, which, considering his on-base-plus-slugging percentage was 67% better than the league average, didn't exactly hold him back this year.

As for Harper, many of the same things are true. He's younger than Trout, having turned 22 in October. As The Washington Post's James Wagner pointed out on Twitter last week, that made Harper younger than every player on the Washington Nationals' Class AAA and AA rosters.

Harper struggled in 2014, but really, these are only struggles measured against the outsized expectations for him. He was 11% better than the league average with his OPS this year and is 21% better than the league over his first three seasons, all at an absurdly young age to even be in the major leagues. And the Nationals still look like they'll be the class of the National League East in 2015, if not years to come.

Still, this is baseball. We try to plan for the future, assume rookie of the year Raul Mondesi will be a star, Chuck Knoblauch will become Charlie Gehringer or Joe Charboneau and Ron Kittle are about to embark on Hall of Fame careers.

And more to the point, there are a number of other MLB players who deserve to be in the conversation for Face of MLB. The game itself, I think, benefits from a wider net, in terms of marketing to the next generation and even the debate itself.

Here are six more I'd like to see in the discussion, not instead of Trout and Harper but in addition to them. A Knights of the MLB Roundtable.

The Los Angeles Dodgers' Yasiel Puig has to be at the top of the list. Really, I don't understand how he isn't already. He'll turn 24 in December. His OPS in his first two seasons is 51% better than the league average. The only players ahead of him over that span? Trout, Miguel Cabrera, Andrew McCutchen, Paul Goldschmidt and David Ortiz.

Puig is athletic enough to play at any of the three outfield spots. His arm is otherworldly. His ability to dazzle on the field is matched by his outsized personality off it. He plays in Los Angeles, for a team that just went to the playoffs for a second year in a row and has a steady stream of talent heading to the major leagues. (File the name Julio Urias away for safekeeping.)

Another worthy Face of MLB is McCutchen, who followed up on his NL MVP in 2013 with an even better 2014. A great center fielder with power who managed to lead the league in on-base percentage (and increase his success rate on stolen bases from 63% to 73% to 86% over the last three seasons) shows no signs of slowing his development as he enters his age-28 season.

The only downside I can see is the relatively small market of Pittsburgh, but even that is overstated in this period of omnipresent national TV games and the Pirates making back-to-back October trips. It worked out OK for the NBA to have LeBron James in Cleveland for seven years (and Kevin Durant in Oklahoma City), and what happened when James went back? ESPN and other outlets sent their Miami reporters north.

One of my favorite players to watch, and who would make an unconventional choice as Face of MLB, would be Andrelton Simmons of the Atlanta Braves. The obvious comparison for this would be Ozzie Smith of the St.Louis Cardinals, a useful answer to anyone who claims someone with an empty .244 batting average — Simmons' in 2014 — ought to be disqualified.

Nobody in today's game does the kind of things on the field that Simmons does. Baseball could do far worse in marketing than just buying time on various stations and playing Simmons' highlights at shortstop in 30-second increments. Simmons turned 25 in September, and he plays for a Braves team that struggled in 2014 but won 91, 89, 94 and 96 games from 2010 to 2013, making the playoffs three of those four seasons.

Then there's Giancarlo Stanton, who turned 25 this month. He hit a career high-tying 37 home runs in 2014. But if you know anything about the experience of seeing Stanton hit, the total number of home runs isn't really the point, any more than the total number of balls Simmons gets to reflects the sheer pleasure of watching him get to them.

Stanton might be the strongest man I've ever seen hit a baseball, and lord knows baseball has been no stranger to muscle-bound types through the years, dating to players such as Ted Kluszewski.

Stanton played in 145 games this year after an unfortunate mid-September beaning, and he still finished with the most home runs and total bases in the NL. His defense is excellent. He even has become a strong baserunner, with 13 steals in 14 attempts this year.

Essentially, the only thing keeping baseball from defining Stanton as the face of the game and moving on is his team situation.

Anyone who believes in the Miami Marlins' ability to keep Stanton is ignoring his public statements and the general actions of the team's ownership group. Stanton will keep on getting expensive, and then he's going to get traded. Once he does, to a contender hopefully, Stanton might end up the Face of MLB by default.

And let's not leave out pitchers, either. Sure, we could go with Puig's Dodgers teammate, Clayton Kershaw, who just had the finest season of any starter since Pedro Martinez was in his prime. Matt Harvey could be the new Joe Namath in New York if the Mets would back off and let him, and Jose Fernandez returns to Miami next season as well. But there are two pitchers in the Midwest who I think we ought to be thinking about instead: Yordano Ventura and Carlos Martinez.

In Ventura, the Royals have a 23-year-old who averaged 98 mph with his four-seam fastball and a measly 97.7 mph with his sinker. He frequently tops 100 with both and managed to improve his strikeout rate and ERA in the second half of his first full season. When Ventura starts, it's an event.

So, too, are appearances for the Cardinals by Martinez. He's another triple-digit arm, with remarkable break on his pitches, and at the risk of reading too much into a small sample, it looks like a lesson clicked this summer when he went down to Class AAA to work on a mechanical adjustment. His ERA when he left? 4.74. When he returned? 1.71. He's just 23, too.

There are many fascinating arms in the Cardinals organization. Martinez has the chance to be the best of them. It will be an upset if they don't eventually make him a starter.

And while a Face of MLB campaign is risky around any pitcher, having a pair of them, throwing lightning bolts on summer nights in Missouri, mitigates the risk while allowing the public to watch them grow into stars.

So how about it, baseball? Rather than a Face of MLB, let's have a Knights of the MLB Roundtable, with Trout, Harper, Puig, McCutchen, Simmons, Stanton, Ventura and Martinez. Dedicate a whole MLB Extra Innings channel to just them. Let the world watch some of the best, most compelling talent baseball has to offer, with the diversification of skills and people in the league serving as an asset, not a marketing complication.

Who knows? It might just help the league to focus a little more on these great young stars and a little less on the self-defeating apologies about how long baseball games take. Let's give the world a limitless supply of those eight. I'll bet you no one complains or even looks at a watch.