Matt Stairs has hit a home run for 11 different MLB teams. He has played for 13. The only two who haven’t been privileged enough to see Matt Stairs trot around the bases? The Montreal Expos, for which Stairs played in 1992 and 1993 … and his current employer, the modern embodiment of the erstwhile ‘Spos: the Washington Nationals.
Stairs, 43, has accumulated just 74 PA this season, but he’s healthy and if he can run into just one pitch in the next two and a half months, he will officially be the only baseball player to ever hit a home run for 12 different teams. Currently, he and Todd Zeile are the only ones to serve up tater tots to the delight of 11 different fanbases, with Russell Branyan hot on their heels with 10 — but 12 would be a brand new feat.
My first reaction upon hearing that someone is in line to be the first person in the history of the game to accomplish something is generally along the lines of thinking that they are, for at least a couple minutes, the coolest dude in the world. Even when Vin Mazzarro was setting a record for the most utterly ineffective relief appearance in the game, it was cool that he was getting shellacked at a historic pace, y’know? Like when the Rangers put up 30 on the Orioles a few years ago — yeah, Orioles fans were probably upset about the game, but I’d be willing to bet that they’d have been even angrier if they’d lost 11-3. When you’re watching something that you know is gonna be in the history books — or, perhaps more accurately, a Jayson Stark column — you appreciate it more.
The funny thing about this particular record, though, is that the proper reaction is kind of ambigious. Well, no, that’s not really true. It’s Matt Stairs; I’ve literally never heard anyone speak ill of Matt Stairs. Pretty much everyone will be happy that he stuck around beltin’ homers until age 43 and did so despite shuttling around the league more often than Alyssa Milano (hey oh!). But there is a certain ignominy in the record, don’t you think? He couldn’t stick with any team for more than five years (Oakland), which generally doesn’t reflect all that well on a guy’s reputation and/or skills. Again, Stairs is a bad example of that principle, but the idea remains the same: when a team has a player they like and want to keep around, they keep him around. Hell, Stairs ended up playing in Japan for 60 games because he couldn’t find a job stateside. How good can he be if no one wanted him?
In Stairs’ case, the answer is that he has been good at what he does … but ‘what he does’ is a very limited subset of baseball skills. A career .262/.356/.477 hitter, he’s posted a career OPS+ of 117, meaning he’s been nearly 20% better than a league average batter. Beyond that, though, Stairs offers very little on-field value; he is a defensive zero and has been for years, and offers nothing on the basepaths. He would draw DH bats on an AL team, and yet is spending his third consecutive season in the NL as, essentially, a one-off designated bench bat*.
*The discussion of whether good professional pinch hitters get more respect than mediocre DHs is an interesting one, I think; people decry Edgar Martinez’s Hall of Fame chances because he was a DH and yet will praise a Lenny Harris, Mark Sweeney or Manny Mota for coming in and getting the job done off the bench. I’m not saying that anyone would argue that any of those bench guys were better than Edgar, but it is the same gradient of praise that we see from broadcasters/fans/players in the dugout when a player lays down a sac bunt vs connecting for an easy single. It’s as if pinch hitting and sacrifice bunting (or, I guess, flying) is somehow nobler than actually being good enough to play everyday and succeed in so doing.
And perhaps that’s a function of his age; Stairs may very well not be able to withstand a full season’s worth of PAs over the age of 40. And while he’s not in tremendous physical condition — which, I’m sure, plays no small part in his enormous popularity — he has established himself as an outlier in the field of longevity. The idea that a guy who’s not a prototypical athlete can hang on for as long as Stairs has gives some credence to the idea that we might one day see a player come along who can catch on with so many different teams and hit a home run for each … but I’m not sure that that player — unless Russell Branyan keeps it up — is an active Major Leaguer right now. The only guys who have been hat collectors in their career are already too old to make a serious run at the record — see e.g. Ivan Rodriguez or Johnny Damon — and with teams making a conscious effort to lock up young players early on, the Itinerant Homer-Knocker isn’t likely to explode in popularity. If we’re going to find that player, it’d have to be a guy who’s not exactly endeared himself to the local fanbase (so that he can be traded early and often) and doesn’t perform well enough to demand a long-term contract. Those are, you might note, practically mutually exclusive; had, say, Elijah Dukes fulfilled his considerable potential, fans and teams would have been far more willing to overlook his off-the-field issues. But he didn’t, so they didn’t. C’est la vie, eh?
And so failing that, we have to find another player who’ll be able to follow the Matt Stairs career path — preferably without the NPB pit stop — and play until he’s bouncing around on one-year deals and pulling down Just For Men sponsorships. Unfortunately, I can’t even pretend to be able to tell you who’ll have such a lengthy career; if I could, you best believe I’d be parlaying that into a job with some team in the MLB. So I say we put it you, dear readers: who do you think has a shot at challenging what I assume will be Matt Stairs’ record of … well, this is really hard to phrase, but … most teams for which one player has hit a home run.
Ok, while you’re at it, how about you suggest a way to record that one in the record books?
