A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

HOW YOU VIEW THE MENDOZA LINE DEPENDS UPON HOW FAR YOU ARE FROM IT: If you're not both a baseball fan and a stat fan, skip this and keep reading the dance stuff below. If you are those things, you might appreciate this. OPS+ is a stat that measures on-base percentage (how seldom a baseball player makes an out) and slugging percentage (how much power a player has, or the ability to hit doubles, triples, and home runs), adjusts them for park effects (it's easier to hit in Coors Field than in Dodger Stadium, for example), and then expresses the result with a number meant to convey how far the result is from the average player. An OPS+ of 100 is set at the league average. An OPS+ of 150 means that the player hits 50% better than the average player. An OPS+ of 75 means that the player hits 25% worse than the average player. The best OPS+ of all time was Barry Bonds's 268 in 2002 (which, by the way, is amazing in a way that steroids can't explain -- for comparison, the best player in the major leagues today is Chipper Jones, with an OPS+ of 190).

I write this because I read on Lookout Landing today that, in almost 200 plate appearances this year, Kansas City Royals shortstop Tony Peña Jr. has earned an OPS+ of 1. One. His offensive value is 1/100th that of the average major league player. If you had a team where every player was Chipper Jones playing a team where every player is Tony Peña Jr., you'd have to let the Peñas have 5,130 outs just to make it a fair fight. The second-worst player in the entire major leagues with at least 100 plate appearances -- the epochally bad Chin-Lung Hu (eta: continuing a tradition of major league baseball players whose names follow the pattern [body part-body part interrogatory]) of the Dodgers, with an OPS+ of 13 -- is 13 times as valuable offensively as Peña.

Incidentally, it seems important to mention that Andruw Jones of the Dodgers is making $18 million this season to put up an OPS+ of 39 -- 61% worse than the average major league player.