Culture
Pirates designate Rowdy Tellez four plate appearances short of a $200K bonus
With the Pittsburgh Pirates out of playoff contention, first baseman Rowdy Tellez was playing for an opportunity to receive a $200,000 bonus based on plate appearances. He entered Tuesday with 421 plate appearances, four away from earning that additional bonus.
For Tellez, the chance was dashed. With five games left in the regular season, the Pirates designated Tellez for assignment before their Tuesday game against the Milwaukee Brewers. With MLB in the final week of its regular season, Tellez will likely end his 2024 campaign at 421 plate appearances, four shy of the 425 needed to earn an extra $200,000.
Pirates general manager Ben Cherington told reporters that the potential for a $200,000 bonus didn’t impact his decision to remove Tellez from the roster.
“We feel like we gave Rowdy lots of opportunity here this year,” Cherington said Tuesday.
The Pirates signed Tellez to a one-year, $3.2 million deal in the offseason. Through 383 at bats in 2024, Tellez slashed .243/.299/.392 with 13 home runs and 56 RBIs. While his overall numbers are an improvement from last year (.215/.291/.376 with 13 home runs and 47 RBIs in 2023), it’s a decline from 2022, where he set a career high in homers (35), RBIs (89) and hits (116).
Tellez struggled to start the 2024 season, tallying just one home run through May. But he improved as the season progressed, the exclamation point happening on July 5 when he hit a homer and a grand slam en route to a 14-2 drubbing over the New York Mets that caused Pittsburgh to run out of fireworks.
The Pirates were trade deadline buyers and entered August chasing a playoff spot. But a 10-game losing streak at the beginning of the month effectively ended the Pirates’ playoff hopes. The Pirates were eliminated from playoff contention on Sept. 16. Eight days later, the team DFA’d Tellez.
MLB players in their contracts are eligible to receive bonuses through the incentive clause according to the CBA. Per MLB’s Basic Agreement, incentives based on statistical achievement are prohibited. This means predetermined, non-statistical benchmarks allow players to earn extra money. For hitters, the most common incentive is plate appearances. Staying on the active roster for a certain number of days can also earn a bonus, depending on the contract.
The Pirates lost 7-2 to the Brewers on Tuesday, falling to 73-84 in 2024. In addition to Tellez, the Pirates also designated outfielder Michael A. Taylor for assignment.
(Photo: Jason Mowry / Getty Images)
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
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