I’ll start by saying that I genuinely enjoy most of the stuff that Jayson Stark writes for ESPN.com. The guy is pretty funny, digs up some interesting stories/stats, and seems to know what he’s talking about. That being said, I have no idea what is going on with this article.

Stark has assembled the “The All-Money Player Team,” the selection criteria for which appears to be a player’s clutch hitting ability/postseason performance record. Apparently, Chipper Jones is the starting 3B for the squad, based on his .870 career postseason OPS. That’s a great postseason OPS, but it’s a little less impressive when you consider that Jones’s career regular season OPS is .956 (which, by the way, makes me realize that Jones is much better than I thought he was; this guy is going to the HOF). So Jones is “All-Money” because he’s really good in the postseason, even though he’s significantly worse in the postseason than in the regular season? (By the way, A-Rod’s career postseason OPS is .844, suspiciously close to the “All-Money” benchmark of .870, even though A-Rod is generally considered to be one of the worst postseason performers of his generation).

To find the the starting SS for the “The All-Money Player Team,” Stark ditched the stats altogether, choosing Jimmy Rollins because “Who loves The Big Moment more than this man?” What does that even mean? Is “The Big Moment” a baseball term that I just haven’t heard yet? Also, Rollins’s career postseason OPS is .732. But that doesn’t matter because he loves The Big Moment. Apparently, in order to be “All-Money,” you don’t have to perform well in The Big Moment, you just have to love it. That’s what I told the admissions officer at Yale when I applied during my senior year in high school: “Don’t worry about the fact that I got a 600 on the SATs - what matters is that I loved taking the SATs!” (It didn’t work, which explains why I’m sitting in white sweatpants in my Mom’s basement, writing a snarky article for a baseball blog).

Chase Utley is the starting 2B for “The All-Money Player Team,” which is hard to dispute. However, Stark bestows the honor on Utley because he “hasn’t taken an inning off since birth.” I’m not really sure what that means, especially since Utley has averaged just under 150 games played during his four full seasons in the majors. So it appears that Utley has actually taken off approximately 108 innings each of the last four seasons. Also, isn’t Utley “All-Money” because he’s really, really good at baseball, not because he’s apparently never taken an inning off.

Following the unveiling of the “The All-Money Player Team,” Stark puts together a series of other hypothetical squads, which are actually even more ridiculous than “The All-Money Player Team.” I’ll spare you an analysis of those teams, since I’m sure most readers have already bailed on this post.

And I shouldn’t really give Stark too hard a time. He was probably told by the ESPN.com editors to put together a quirky column for the web site’s MLB Season Preview and this is what he came up with under deadline.