Let’s Help Jack Reacher Remember Some Guys

Reacher needs our help. Reacher is in trouble, and only we baseball nerds can provide the assistance he needs. Wait, I should back up.

Reacher is the eponymous protagonist of the television show Reacher, based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. He’s an enormous former military policeman and current drifter who wanders across America maiming, torturing, and murdering people – but, like, in a good way. It’s another in a long line of entertainments based on the simple premise that it’s perfectly fine to enjoy watching somebody commit horrific acts of violence so long as they visit that violence on people who deserve it. It’s also a baseball show. Reacher likes baseball. Most of the characters like baseball. They tie themselves in knots wedging baseball into conversations where it absolutely does not belong, and for that I not only salute them. I want to help.

Trouble always finds Reacher. He visits Georgia to pay his respects to a legendary blues singer and stumbles onto the world’s largest counterfeiting operation. He visits Philadelphia to watch an unnamed Phillies pitcher who touches 105 mph and winds up entangled in a plot to auction off chemical weapons to the highest bidder. He visits Maine for lobster and just happens to run into a man he once marched to the edge of a cliff, shot in the head, and left for dead. (Just to clarify once more: In this world, the guy who got shot in the head and fell off the cliff is the bad guy; the shooter is the good guy.)

Because trouble always seems to find him, Reacher takes precautions. He stays off the grid. He travels by bus. He checks into fleabag motels under false names. And because he’s a baseball fan, he always uses the names of Yankees second basemen. We’re going to help him do a better job of that, because, well, he sucks at it.

The show follows a pattern. Each season, Reacher arrives in a new town and uncovers a vast conspiracy. Each season, he murders and murders and murders his way toward the truth alongside a tough local law enforcement officer. Each season, the tough local cop initially loathes Reacher and begs him to please stop murdering so many people, but by the end considers him a lifelong friend and doesn’t mind the murders so much. Each season, a slim, no-nonsense woman with straight hair throws herself at Reacher in a hotel bathroom. Each season, Reacher and a scrappy team of confederates foil the dastardly plan through hard work, cleverness, and a sustained campaign of grisly violence. Each season, Reacher hits the road again with only the clothes on his back and a travel toothbrush. Oh, and each season, Reacher’s brilliant Yankees second baseman strategy completely backfires.

The strategy is fundamentally, though not fatally, flawed. The whole point of using an alias is to maintain your anonymity, which means picking a name that’s not going to cause anyone to think twice. That’s why the standard fake name is Joe Smith and not Jazz Chisholm Jr. The Yankees are the most famous and popular team in baseball, with the most storied history. Their players have the most name recognition. Picking any other team would instantly improve Reacher’s security. If he really wanted to stay anonymous, he could have just picked current members of the Colorado Rockies. No one is going to convince me that Zach Agnos isn’t already a fake name.

I’m not just nitpicking as an outsider and a baseball nerd. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief. The gag comes straight from the books, which establish that Reacher has been working through the Yankees one position at a time, and had already worked his way through the U.S. vice presidents. The problem is that even in the world of Reacher, this plan keeps failing. Over and over again, people instantly recognize his aliases. It’s not just that he’s picking Yankees second basemen. It’s a suboptimal strategy, but it’s still workable if used judiciously. The bigger issue is that Reacher keeps picking particularly recognizable second basemen. He’s not even making us remember some guys.

In season two, Reacher checked into a hotel – in New York City – under the name Starlin Castro. You will not be surprised to learn that the bad guy instantly recognized the name. Castro was a four-time All-Star (once as a Yankee), he was still playing professionally at the time, and, of course, he just happened to have a very memorable name. I don’t know about you, but I tend not to run into that many Starlins on a daily basis.

In season three, Reacher blew his cover by checking into a New England motel using the name of Rob Refsnyder, who was, at the time, in his fourth season of putting up fantastic numbers for the Red Sox by destroying left-handed pitching. Chad Jennings even interviewed Refsnyder about it for The Athletic. One rule of thumb when picking an alias is to avoid the name of someone who’s so prominent that they have a scheduled press availability the next day.

The best part of the interview was when Refsnyder briefly believed he had watched the first season of the show. He turned out to be thinking of Jack Ryan, a totally different Amazon show starring a freakishly large former sitcom star, based on a beloved series of thriller novels, and about an idealistic, too-smart-for-his-own-good, baseball-loving Iraq War veteran named Jack R. who sticks his nose where it doesn’t belong to foil terrorist plots. Like I said, totally different.

Reacher’s inability to choose a good alias isn’t just annoying. It makes it harder to suspend your disbelief because it doesn’t fit with the rest of his character. In every other capacity, Reacher is portrayed as a brilliant investigator. He reads people. He notices the tiniest details. He makes head-spinning, Holmesian deductions. He speaks at least five languages. He should be able to pick a decent alias. He’s always the smartest guy in the room, though to be fair, that’s partly because the room is always full of people whose internal monologue goes something like:

“I know he’s 6-foot-5 and I’m only 5-foot-2, and I know I just watched him punch three of my coworkers so hard that their entire skeletons flew out of their mouths and started tap dancing, and I know I was just diagnosed with hemophilia, osteoporosis, and an as-yet-unnamed condition my doctor refers to as ‘super anemia,’ and I now realize that I accidentally loaded up my gun with Mike & Ikes instead of bullets again, but I think I can take him.”

So we are going to help Reacher pick some better aliases, and we’re going to do it the way a detail-obsessed baseball nerd like Reacher would want us to do it. We’re going to create a junk stat that calculates the recognizability of Yankees second basemen. I think he would be open to the assistance, because he doesn’t always do a bad job. In season one, he checked in as Mark Salas, a journeyman who never actually played second base but certainly flies under the radar. In season three, Reacher illegally bought a gun under the name of Joe Gordon. Gordon is literally a Hall of Famer, but because he last played in 1950, his name isn’t all that recognizable these days.

That’s our rubric. We’re going to find players who are obscure either because they didn’t make much of an impact or because they played so long ago that the average proprietor of a crappy roadside motel won’t recognize their name. Luckily, Jay Jaffe has already done a big chunk of the work for us. His JAWS metric assesses worthiness for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, and it will work great for our purposes.

The aptly named Katie Sharp of Stathead graciously provided me with a list of all 246 players who have ever spent time at second base for the Yankees (or their precursor, the New York Highlanders), along with their JAWS scores. The list includes some names you wouldn’t necessarily expect, like Mickey Mantle, Don Mattingly, and Jorge Posada, each of whom played second in just one game. I then pulled how long it had been since each player’s last big league season and set about crunching the numbers to find the right balance.

The top of the list needs to be a mix of great players and recent players, and just because I think it would tick off a Yankee fan like Reacher, we’re going to name this metric the Production/Era-Dependent Relative Obscurity Index Algorithm, or PEDROIA for short. If you’re curious, the formula ended up like this:

The negative 20 at the end conveniently brings the metric to a round-number range that’s easy to understand. Mickey Mantle is at the bottom with a -90, while Queenie O’Rourke, whom Baseball-Reference tragically lists as Jimmy O’Rourke, is at the top with a 98. (Queenie O’Rourke is also the son of Hall of Famer Jim O’Rourke.) The top and bottom 30 are below, and anyone who’s interested can find the entire list here.

Because I kept it to just two inputs, PEDROIA is far from perfect. The extreme recency bias required to get players like Anthony Volpe and José Caballero to the bottom of the list probably pushes Hall of Famers like Gordon, Tony Lazzeri, and Joe Sewell way too high for the liking of serious baseball fans. PEDROIA doesn’t know that Leo Durocher, Billy Martin, and Bobby Cox achieved widespread fame as managers, that the reputations of Mattingly, Bobby Richardson, and Phil Rizzuto far outstripped their JAWS, or that Chisholm was on the cover of MLB the Show. I don’t know how to teach it that although Hall of Famer Wee Willie Keeler and Al Orth put up nearly identical JAWS totals at the turn of the century, Keeler’s name is legendary while Orth’s has been forgotten by time.

Lastly, while I was very tempted institute a silly name penalty, I ultimately decided introducing that kind of subjective metric into this precise mathematical formula would sully the serious sabermetric work we’re doing here. As a result, PEDROIA vastly overrates the discreteness of names like Stubby Magner, Roxey Roach, Rollie Zeider, Birdie Cree, Bill Knickerbocker, Steve Sax, Homer Bush, Snuffy Stirnweiss, and, of course, Queenie O’Rourke at the very top of the list. I sincerely hope that Reacher never checks into a motel under the name Queenie O’Rourke. He will end up buried out back and there will be no one left to save us from the cavalcade of massive criminal conspiracies that lurk just beneath the idyllic surface of every hamlet where he rests his giant, square, God-knows-how-many-times-concussed head.

Still, even this imperfect guide should be more than enough to improve Reacher’s tradecraft, because PEDROIA shows us just how bad his choices really were. Both Castro and Refsnyder have PEDROIA scores of -20, which makes them, respectively, the 22nd- and 24th-worst choices out of the entire 246 names on the list. Even Gordon has a PEDROIA score of just 14, which puts him in the 36th percentile. Reacher’s only genuinely good pull was Salas, who doesn’t qualify because he never played second base, not even in the minors.

Once again, those who want to peruse all 246 names on the leaderboard can do so here. And just in case Reacher is reading this, your track record compels me to advise you of two things. First, a number with a minus sign in front of it is bad, not good. You are not now, nor have you ever been Starlin Castro, and no one is going to believe that you are Mickey Mantle or Robinson Canó. You make a much more convincing Joe Ward. Second, and please don’t murder me for saying this, but I think a bit of therapy would do you a world of good.