We’re going to take a brief break from talking trade deadline stuff here at The Outside Corner to have a little bit of fun. With our smartphones.
What an older generation knows as the board game Scrabble, a younger generation knows as its younger, hipper cell phone cousin Words With Friends. It’s a game that has caught on like wildfire over the course of the past year as seemingly everyone has traded in their old, slow cell phones for new, shiny, do just about anything you’d like with it smartphones.
The game doesn’t allow you to play proper names. But in the midst of a heated battle against one of my Twitter followers today (and yes, I know that says a lot more about me than it should), I got to wondering which MLB-ers have the most valuable names if you were, hypothetically, allowed to play proper names in the game.
Not surprisingly, there is no correlation between being a great baseball player and being a great (hypothetical) play in WWF. And if these scores indicated a potential World Series matchup, we’d be looking at a lot of orange, with the Orioles squaring off against the Giants. If you’re one of the few who is dying to know how many points your name would amount to in a game of Words With Friends, you can find out by clicking here.
All that aside, without further ado, here are your top 12 Words With Friends MLB-er names, a list dominated by pitchers that are…well average, except for the WWF scores their names provide.
Javier Vazquez (Florida) = 58
Ladies and gentleman, Javier Vazquez won’t be competing for the Cy Young Award this season, what with a line of 7-9, 4.88 ERA but he is the most valuable name in a game of MLB Words With Friends. His case is bolstered by not one but four ten-point letters plus a pair of five pointers.
Marc Rzepczynski (St. Louis) = 52
Long last name, multiple Z’s, and an equipment manager’s nightmare of a nameplate on the back of his jersey. It’s a wonder we haven’t seen his last name misspelled on a jersey more frequently over the course of his career.
Jeff Samardzija (Cubs) = 51
Hard to fault Samardzija for being so happy to be this high on the list. Samardzija’s not having a terrible season either, one that can only augmented by being one of only three MLB players to have a name that scores 50 or higher in Words With Friends.
Jordan Zimmermann (Washington) 47
Michael Gonzalez (Baltimore) = 46
Jarrod Saltalamacchia (Boston) = 43
Chris Jakubauskas (Baltimore) = 43
Jonathan Sanchez (San Francisco) = 43
Alex Gonzalez (Atlanta) = 42
Jair Jurrjens (Atlanta) = 41
Jeff Keppinger (San Francisco) = 41
Francisco Rodriguez (Milwaukee) = 41
