That Zack Short has, somehow, accrued 538 major-league plate appearances up to this point in his career is an object lesson. It is really hard to find a major-league shortstop. That he garnered 69 plate appearances for the defending division champion Atlanta Braves – his fourth team in six months, after Detroit, New York, and Boston – is an indictment.

Zack Short’s career triple slash is .167/.269/.287; rather astonishingly, according to Fangraphs, his defense is also negative. For his career, he has a total of -1.5 WAR. A seventeenth-round draft pick out of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, he’s the only major leaguer among that school’s draftees. (Fairfield University, the better-known school in town, has a similarly dismal draft history.)

But he is actually not his school’s most successful graduate: that would be his college and later Detroit teammate, Tiger closer Jason Foley, whom the team signed as an amateur free agent after a good performance in the Cape Cod league. Foley went undrafted but picked up a wicked sinker along the way that turned him into one of the better relievers in the league. (When Short played the Cape Cod league, he hit .182.)

A 2023 Athletic profile of the two noted that it was a nice story that two guys from a middling college baseball program ended up in the majors together, but Short is more or less the same guy he’s always been:

Short ended up at Sacred Heart because it was his only real offer. He was 140 pounds coming out of high school, a talented infielder but not the type of guy who caught the eye of many scouts. He had some interest from nearby Fairfield University, but Sacred Heart offered first, and Short accepted.

It’s not really fair to blame any of this on Zack Short, a genial kid from the Hudson Valley who’s gotten to live his dream in the major leagues for longer than any scout who ever saw him in high school could have imagined. Everything I’ve read about him makes him seem like a sweet, humble guy who appreciates just how fortunate he’s been to play in the majors and who works hard, does his best, and is liked by his teammates.

So why am I complaining at such baroque length about a player who only made four starts and only was a member of the team for a couple of months? Because, for me, Short is emblematic – and because I’m the kind of barfly who rarely can let well enough alone and only grouse about a thing just once. I see Short as a symbol of what I saw as Alex Anthopoulos’s struggle to populate the back end of the roster. A weak back half of the lineup is what cost the Yankees the World Series, and it nearly cost the Braves a playoff spot.

Many of you said I was too harsh on AA, as the spate of injuries truly was catastrophic, and enough to ruin even the best-laid plans. But I hope we’re never in a position to consider having to pencil him into a starting lineup ever again.