Season 2 of Eastbound & Down started last night, with washed-up former Major League pitcher Kenny Powers winding up in Mexico. Granted, this show is incredibly crude and I will try not to make too many references to it in this blog, but we can do a fun little experiment with Latex for this post.

Kenny Powers has an fan page, on which you we can see his stats from the back of his baseball cards. Here is a table of those stats:

$\begin{tabular}{|l||l|l|l|l|l|l|l|l|l|l|} \hline Season & Team & G & IP & ER & BB & SO & W & L & SV & ERA\\ \hline 2002 & ATL & 62 & 67 & 21 & 30 & 106 & 7 & 3 & 49 & 2.85\\ \hline 2003 & NY & 64 & 62.2 & 33 & 20 & 79 & 7 & 3 & 39 & 4.74\\ \hline 2004 & SF & 52 & 54.2 & 40 & 27 & 44 & 3 & 10 & 30 & 6.59\\ \hline 2005 & BOS & 15 & 12.2 & 12 & 9 & 6 & 0 & 6 & 3 & 8.57\\ \hline 2006 & SEA & ? & ? & ? & ? & ? & ? & ? & ? & ?\\ \hline TOTAL & & 208 & 221 & 107 & 86 & 263 & 21 & 22 & 133 & 4.40\\ \hline \end{tabular}$

David Appelman at Fangraphs actually determined how good of a pitcher he was, based on Value Wins. The formula for Win Values, explained here, requires a few values that we are not given, but we can give a rough estimate. And it turns out that even in his best years, Kenny Powers wasn’t even one of the top 10 pitchers in the league. So unfortunately for Kenny, he really didn’t have that much value in his short-lived career.