Since the worst player in the majors plays baseball with more skill and grace than 99 of 100 people do anything at all, it feels rude and boorish to point out that someone has to be that worst player. Still, it’s so. Over the rest of the season, while players such as Jose Reyes, Joe Mauer, Albert Pujols, and Grady Sizemore demonstrate what it means to be the absolute best in the world at something, other players show what it means to be something less. One of them will wear the anti-crown. He will be the least valuable player in baseball.

Who this person might be isn’t yet clear, and how one even might identify him is a decent question, fit for the sort of theoretical work that could get one hired by a real live team. Narrowing the matter down isn’t, though, quite as difficult as you might think, and leads quickly to some surprising results.

Granting that the actual worst player in the majors is some poor schlub who, in a week’s worth of lifeless at bats, convinced his team to send him straight back to the bushes, there are only a few serious candidates. To be really awful you need not just to be bad, but to be bad in many opportunities — and, I would argue, bad to no purpose. This first clause is easily fulfilled; the second, slightly less so; the third, not so easily fulfilled at all. As stupid as many fans take their team to be, not many clubs are dumb enough to waste hundreds of at bats to no end.

Among the 10 players with the worst on-base plus slugging averages out of those with at least 400 plate appearances — a mildly arbitrary but useful way of getting at the bad players who combine quantity with lack of quality — there aren’t so many truly lousy players as you might expect. Melky Cabrera’s .242 BA/.296 OBA/.337 SLG line, for instance, horrific as it is (it’s fifth-worst among players with 400 plate appearances), has to be put in context: Cabrera had a fine track record before this year, and he’ll most likely have a successful career from here on out. The same is true of Minnesota’s Carlos Gomez. He’s hitting .251/.289/.342, but, as Mets fans should recall, he’s also a spectacular center fielder, possibly the best in the game, and he’s also 22. At worst, Gomez will prove a valuable fourth outfielder in years to come. Oakland first baseman Daric Barton, similarly, may be hitting terribly (.221/.316/.340), but at 23, and having been a top prospect for years, his playing time has hardly been wasted. He’s a young player having a difficult time in his first full year, not a truly bad player.

There is a class of player that’s somewhat dodgier. Twenty-four-year-old Atlanta outfielder Jeff Francoeur, for instance, is hitting .233/.293/.356. Should he be written off or not? The Braves did send him down to the minors earlier this year, and he’s shown exactly no improvement since. However much potential he may have, it isn’t showing up on the field, and at some point any playing time given him has to be said simply to have been wasted. The same might be said of Houston center fielder Michael Bourn, 25, who has the absolute worst OPS among players with 400 or more PA, at an appalling .583, and he’s an outrageously bad fielder. Are at bats given such players investments in youth, or just good money thrown after bad players? Presumably the last three weeks will tell, but given how atrocious both these two have been lately — Bourn hit .137 in August before being moved up to the leadoff spot for the stretch run — one tends to think it’s the latter.

For my money, though, the one player who seems to be nearing a lock on the title of the least valuable in baseball has to be Gary Matthews Jr. of the Los Angeles Angels. The players mentioned above, and others such as Oakland’s Jack Hannahan, are young enough that any at bat they’re given can be at least theoretically written off as an investment in the future. This is not so of the wretched Matthews, who’s 34, hitting .236/.314/.344 with at best passable defense, and raking in $9.4 million this year. He may be better at playing ball than most anyone you’ve ever met is at doing anything, but anyone who makes $9.4 million for hitting like Melky Cabrera and playing much worse defense certainly deserves an award of some sort. One presumes that with a really bad stretch run Bourn or Francoeur might overtake him on the straight merits, but once you put salary into play, the question seems near settled. Let Pujols and Reyes and their ilk compete for MVP awards; Matthews has his eyes on something else entirely.

tmarchman@nysun.com