It’s good to be famous: Once enough people know your name, it doesn’t much matter what you’ve done, or what you’re likely to do. Even in baseball, which comes as near to being a true meritocracy as any institution in America, having the right name can overwhelm all evidence and reason. The reasons aren’t mysterious — man has an evolved bias for the familiar over the strange — but the consequences can be bizarre.

Take first baseman Richie Sexson, who signed with the Yankees Friday. On July 10, when he was released by Seattle, the worst team in baseball, Sexson was hitting .219 which, if anything, overstated his value. With a slugging average of .379, a strikeout rate of one for every three at bats, and a batting average of .132 with runners in scoring position, Sexson was about as comprehensively bad at the plate as it’s possible for a first baseman to be. Amazingly, this was actually an improvement on last year’s performance, when he hit .205 with little power.

On a per-dollar basis, Sexson has been one of the three worst players in baseball this year, behind the Dodgers’ Andruw Jones ($18.1 million for a .162 AVG/.266 OBA/.246 SLG line in 167 at bats) and San Francisco’s Barry Zito ($18 million, which works out to a million for each base runner he puts on per inning), but ahead of everyone else. Given his inept defense and atrocious baserunning, the surprise isn’t that Seattle released him despite owing him the rest of his $14 million salary, but rather that this took as long as it did.

Even stranger than that, though, is that the Yankees not only signed a player who is on all evidence totally cooked, but have signed him for a quite specific role that he quite obviously won’t be able to fill.

Friday, hours after signing with the Yankees, Sexson was in the lineup against Oakland starter Greg Smith, a lefty. Saturday, he came in for a pinch-hit at bat against Jerry Blevins, another lefty. Yesterday, while he didn’t get any at bats at all, he did come in at the top of the 9th as a defensive substitute at first base. From this, it looks as if manager Joe Girardi will be using Sexson exactly as you’d expect: as part of the ever-spinning first base carousel with a special line in lefty-mashing and late-inning defense. If a better use for Sexson than the one Seattle came up with — penciling him into the lineup every day while sighing wistfully over the long-ago days when he twice smacked 45 home runs in a season for Milwaukee — this is still ridiculous.

This year, in 65 at bats, Sexson has a fine .338/.429/.600 line against lefties. Last year, though, in 105 at bats, he hit .238/.333/.419, and the year before, in 137 at bats, he hit .204/.325/.438. Even if you arbitrarily ignore the hundreds and hundreds of at bats in which Sexson has conclusively showed that he can’t hit right-handers anymore, there is still no real reason to think he can hit left-handers at all. Either one has to believe that 65 at bats against lefties this year are more telling than everything else he’s done over a period of years; or one has to admit that his line against them this year is statistical noise.

Similarly, not only is there no reason at all to think he can handle a role as a defensive substitute, there’s actually good reason to think he’s a hilariously bad fit. Mitchel Lichtman’s UZR, one of the best independent defensive systems, has pegged Sexson as being about 20 runs worse than average at first for several years now, and I’m not aware of any reason to think the system is missing something. Sexson is slow and awkward with little range, and this year has made plays on only 70% of the balls in his area of responsibility. Playing him as a defensive substitute is basically comparable to playing Jason Giambi as one.

None of this is going to especially cost the Yankees this season — Sexson isn’t going to get a lot of playing time unless he gets hot, and if he gets hot, the team should take advantage of it — but it is a bit of worrying backsliding on the part of team management. Look back over Yankees rosters from several years ago, and you’ll see the oddest assortment of names, players such as Terrence Long, Tony Womack, and Matt Lawton, who had no qualifications other than their semi-famous names. Over the last two years, the roster has been blessedly free of such players. If playing Sexson in a role to which he’s almost uniquely ill-suited proves a one-off mistake, it won’t be a real problem. If he heralds the coming of an endless wave of similar types coasting on name value and undeserved reputations, that will be something else entirely.

tmarchman@nysun.com