What Can YOU Offer a Major-League Lineup?

I got to thinking: how much damage could I do to a major-league offense? I don’t mean some idealized version of my “wildest dreams” self. I mean me as I exist within the disappointing constraints of reality. Thanks to the way-cool lineup analysis tool over at Baseball Musings, I can take a stab at this.

The operating assumption … I didn’t play baseball past the ninth grade. I had a pretty good line-drive stroke, but because there was no loft to my swing I didn’t have a lot of power. I drew a lot of walks (never mind that this was mostly because I was scared of the ball and preferred to stand in the demilitarized fringe of the batter’s box with lumber on shoulder) and could run the bases well enough. Take those modest skills and throw in the fact that I soon turn 39 and put me up against major-league pitching, and you have a hitter that challenges the boundaries of incompetence. How bad? I don’t really know, but I’m assuming at the plate I’d be half as good as the worst hitting pitcher in baseball. Last season, that was Hiroki Kuroda who “hit” .036/.070/.036. So I’ll give me a batting line of .018/.035/.018. That’s something like one seeing-eye Texas League-er or instance of charitable score-keeping per month. Let the free-agent bidding commence!

On that point … Even in the universe of the hypothetical I can’t fathom playing a defensive position. Doing so at anything above the rec-softball level would yield an outcome too horrible to contemplate. I am a DH. Also, I live in Chicago and don’t feel like relocating, so I’ll be DHing for the White Sox and necessarily taking Adam Dunn’s job. I’ll be sure to run hard out of the box so people like me.

Anyhow, here’s what happens … I took those Bill James projections of ours and plugged them into the lineup tool. The Sox’s lineup plus me at DH, using the worst possible batting order (an arrangement that always entails my batting leadoff), scores … 3.54 runs per game. That’s not good!

And at what cost? Give Dunn his job back and escort me — bloodied and shamed — off the premises, and the Sox, using the best possible lineup, score … 5.26 runs per game. The difference? Over the course of a full season, the Dunn lineup would outscore the Perry lineup by, oh, roughly 280 runs.

Conclusion: I suck!