You can’t take your eyes off Trea Turner. Sometimes he wishes you would.

His family and friends are sitting somewhere behind home plate. He can see their faces if he squints. They are, after all, the only people he cares about impressing. That is true in 2021, and he expects it to be true in 2026. His imagination, however mundane, is his way of sharing a tiny piece of his head space: He is not in this for fame or recognition. He rejects the word “star.” Outside the chalk lines, on busy streets in Washington, in the quiet of his house, he actually would prefer that no one talks about him.

He is set on this in the same way he is set on quietly stacking one honest minute on another. He has goals, sure, but is sometimes afraid that making them, that speaking them aloud, could keep him from thinking bigger. How big? He won’t say. He may not know the answer. He has just one real ask for who Trea Turner is in a half-decade. He wants nothing to change.

“I hope I’m still young,” Turner, 27, said on a video call this month. “That would be good enough for me.”

• • •

So the player who bends time is more interested in stopping it.

Whether he likes it or not, Turner is a potential star for many reasons. He led the majors with 78 hits last season. He led all shortstops in batting average (.335), on-base percentage (.394) and slugging percentage (.588), and he smacked 12 home runs in 59 games. If he signs a contract extension before free agency, it will cost the Nationals a lot of money over a lot of years. And if he gets to free agency after the 2022 season, one winter after a whole class of top-rate shortstops, he could drum up a serious bidding war.

But Turner’s speed clashes with his desire to coast beneath the radar. His style is built on literal flash. Statcast defines a “bolt” as any run in which a player goes faster than 30 feet per second. In 2020, Turner had 48 of them. The next closest player had 25. Turner used his legs for 12 stolen bases, four triples and an inside-the-park homer that turned the diamond into a track meet, each base a hurdle, the winner finishing belly-down in a cloud of dust.

A lightning-fast, well-rounded franchise shortstop is a marketing department’s dream. Yet Turner rejects that he could be the face of, well, anything.

“I mean, I’m not really famous,” Turner said without blinking, noting that current and past teammates such as Juan Soto and Bryce Harper get a lot more attention. “Some people get picked up by the media and get blasted everywhere. And not in a bad way. I’m just saying, like, a lot of articles, a lot of photos, this and that.

“That’s what drives attention. That’s what makes superstars and all that. But for me, I don’t really care. I like to separate those two things.”

The catch is that being famous — being liked, a superstar, whatever — can work on a sliding scale with being good. It can make a contract grow. It can matter in certain contexts.

Turner, then, is okay with getting props for what he does from the first pitch to the final out. He just insists that, no, his one-day-at-a-time, just-worry-about-the-next-at-bat approach is not a way to burrow himself in a fortress of cliches. That could be tough to believe from a player who is judged on yesterday’s results and tomorrow’s possibilities and who, in the coming years, will be paid more for what he could do than what he has done. Turner, though, won’t budge off thoughts that sound straight out of a self-help book. He is fine with telling his agents to skip an interview or photo shoot.

Those agents, Jeff Berry and Andrew Nacario, met Turner while he was tearing through three seasons at North Carolina State. Berry’s favorite Turner play came in May 2014, when Turner, a junior, tried to steal home on a lobbed throw back to the pitcher. He slid in headfirst, ramming his face into the catcher’s shin pad, and was called out despite appearing safe. Then Turner shot up and chucked his helmet at the dugout in frustration. Nacario lists off a couple of old triples as vintage Turner.

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They both see a shortstop who has the same career on-base-plus-slugging percentage as New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor (a star, by Turner’s estimation). They see an athlete with appeal.

“You have to be authentic,” said Berry, who, with Nacario, heads Creative Artists Agency’s baseball division. “It’s not something you have to try hard at. Not for Trea, because it’s not the end goal.”

“You know ‘Talk the talk’ or ‘Walk the walk’? I just want to walk,” Turner explained. “I just want to do my job and have fun and enjoy my teammates, and I don’t need to tell everybody that, oh, this is what I’m doing or this is how good I am. I just want to … I don’t need to talk. I just want to play baseball, basically.”

In July 2018, though, Turner was pushed out front by his mistakes. A handful of tweets from 2011 and 2012 that included homophobic and racially insensitive language recirculated. He made a tearful apology to his teammates before addressing reporters. Reflecting on it almost three years later, he sees that as when he recognized the true weight of his actions and words.

“Nobody is perfect. I’m not perfect. But I’ll continue to try to be a better version of myself, and that’s a never-ending process,” Turner said. “I hurt people, and I’m still sorry. That got me on a better track but only because I wanted to learn from it, I wanted to take responsibility and, I mean, it’s part of my story, who I was and where I want to go next.”

• • •

After his first year at N.C. State, Turner returned to Athletes Advantage, a workout facility in Wellington, Fla., with a plan. Ed Smith has coached Turner there since he was a 5-foot-4, 100-pound high school freshman. He of course knew that Turner had set an N.C. State record with 57 steals in 2012. That’s why Elliott Avent, the Wolfpack’s head coach, started calling him “Seabiscuit.” Turner was the small horse that never lost a race.

“What is wrong with that coaching staff?” Smith recalled saying, ribbing Turner. “They just let you have the green light that many times?”

“I don’t know,” Turner responded, eyes down. “But we need to talk about that.”

“Why is that?” Smith asked.

“We need to work on my running form,” Turner said. “I really feel like I still don’t run well.”

Smith laughed. Turner already was one of the fastest players in college baseball. This was the same kid who, at 14, was against cutting back his training during the season. Smith always wished Turner had more fun. But Turner was fixated on getting faster, getting stronger, reaching higher than a player who received just two Division I scholarship offers before sprouting to a skinny 6-2.

To add speed, Smith strapped Turner into a harness, put himself on the other end, then gave Turner 10 steps to reach a cone placed far away. He had to take long strides to get there while pulling Smith with him. Now, Smith says, Turner’s steps cover maybe three times as much ground as an average player’s. That’s why, when sprinting, Turner often can look as if he is floating above the dirt.

The search for an edge has narrowed and narrowed, as if Turner is viewing himself through a straw. He wants to improve his lateral quickness. He wants to improve his defense. He thrived last season by turning his cold zone, the low-and-outside corner, into a launchpad for opposite-field power. This winter, he told Smith that he was getting to his right big toe faster than his left big toe, altering his first step. He has started taking left-handed swings to alleviate any hip tightness caused by repeating the same motion.

“It must be torture to be in his mind, to be honest with you,” Smith said. “Because he studies everything out.”

Which leads right back to Turner’s perfect summer night. Yes, he says with another grin, the Nationals win. And yes, he has a part in that. But he doesn’t rock four homers. He doesn’t hit for the cycle for the third time. He doesn’t even get on base in every plate appearance.

Turner’s fictional stat line is a single, a homer, a groundout and a strikeout. The single shoots up the middle and takes one hop before reaching the center fielder. The homer could be 500 feet or nick the foul pole; he doesn’t care. The strikeout is to motivate him during the game. The groundout, a weak rollover, is to have something that will anger him the next morning. The idea is imperfection, to fail and stay on track.

“Going 0 for 4 sucks, and going 4 for 4 is the greatest feeling in the world. But going 2 for 4 is a great day in baseball,” Turner said before repeating himself: “And one great day is good enough for me.”

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Trea Turner received a scholarship offer from Florida International. He received a scholarship offer from Florida Atlantic.