It’s probably harder to be the worst player in baseball in a given year than it is to be the best, for the simple reason that if you’re among the few who have a chance at being the best you’ll keep playing, while if you’re among the few who have a chance at being the worst you won’t. It takes special conditions for a ballplayer to stay in the lineup all year long despite being truly awful.

The worst hitters of 2006 prove the point. Colorado’s Clint Barmes was the worst of all, hitting .220 BA/.264 OBA/.335 SLG while playing half his games in Coors Field, which doesn’t play like Mars these days but is still an excellent hitter’s park. There were, though, extenuating circumstances. Before being injured by a package of deer meat in 2005, he hit exceptionally well, he’s just 27, he was playing for a rebuilding team, and he’s a good defensive shortstop. Those are all decent reasons to stick with someone who hits like a pitcher. Other execrable hitters who racked up the playing time last year tended to be either great defensive players, such as St. Louis’s Yadier Molina and Houston’s Brad Ausmus, or young players on bad teams learning on the job, such as the Cubs’ Ronny Cedeno. These aren’t really the sort of players who could fairly be considered the worst players in baseball.

True horror is to be found only in genuinely ugly circumstances, when bad hitters with no defensive value and no prospect of being valuable to their team in the future play day after day despite doing nothing at all. When you find a player like this, you’ll usually spot a bad field manager and inept executives nearby. Most often, the inept executives will have signed the bad player for a lot of money. “Jurassic” Carl Everett, for instance, hit .227/.297/.360 in 92 games for Seattle last year, earning $3.4 million and playing all but two games as a designated hitter. He was 35, coming off two years in which he hadn’t done much in baseball, and was suiting up for a team going nowhere. He was also Carl Everett — headbutter of umpires, denier of the existence of dinosaurs, alleged abuser of children. An awful ballplayer and a miserable human being playing exceptionally bad in circumstances in which the best he had to offer would have done no good, Everett was, for my coin, the worst player in the game last year.

Sadly, this year we’re likely to see worse seasons than Everett’s. One early candidate for the worst player of the year is Everett’s replacement, Jose Vidro. Everything is in place. Vidro, 32, is an adequate hitter for a middle infielder, but will be playing as a DH. The Mariners owe him $12 million over the next two years and are run by the same people who kept running Everett out there last year, so Vidro will be in the lineup. It’s only his remarkable ability to be injured that keeps him from a place among the surest bets to be terrible this year. If he’s not playing, he can’t hurt his team.

Among those with a chance of being even worse than Vidro are, sadly, two formerly great players in unique circumstances. The first is Houston’s Craig Biggio. Probably the second best position player of his generation, Biggio has no business playing regularly at second base — he’s 41, plays the field like he’s 82, and hit .178/.253/.288 away from Houston’s bandbox of a ballpark last year — but will be allowed to do so because he has 2,930 career hits. Biggio has certainly earned the right to hang on by his fingernails if he wants to do so, but it’s still sad to see such a winning ballplayer reduced to actively hurting a contending team in pursuit of a meaningless number. He’s going to be awful.

Across Texas, Sammy Sosa, who hasn’t played in two years and was one of the worst in the game when we last saw him, will settle in as a DH in hopes of hitting his 600th home run. There will be no sadness in watching this crass, farcical spectacle, because Sosa is a selfpromoting bum and the Rangers can’t even offer the sort of loyaltybased excuses the Astros can, reducing the thing to an obvious sham at which we can laugh freely. There will, though, be suspense. Just how rotten will Sosa have to be before he’s benched, given that he’s just 12 home runs away from becoming only the fifth player to belt 600? I suspect we’ll find out as the Rangers chase the big gates that will come if Sosa does approach his meaningless number, something that should take him until August given his age and incompetence.

Last we come home to New York, where copy editor’s bane Doug Mientkiewicz will settle in as the long half of a first base platoon for the Yankees. In his prime, playing for Minnesota, Mientkiewicz did a pretty good Keith Hernandez impression, playing great defense and hitting just enough doubles and drawing just enough walks to offset a lack of home run power. That was years ago; Mientkiewicz will be 33 this year, hasn’t been even an average hitter since 2003, and his great defense exists in the same place Hernandez’s does — in the memories of adoring fans. While Vidro has his contract, and Biggio and Sosa have their big round numbers, Mientkiewicz has still more powerful forces working for him beyond his lack of the skill to be a major league regular — a great defensive reputation, an image as a scrappy, hard-working guy on a team on which literally every other position is played by someone with a real shot at the Hall of Fame, and manager Joe Torre’s seeming desire to get as little offense out of first base as he possibly can. The Yankees are loaded, and one suspects it won’t matter a bit how bad Mientkiewicz is. I have a feeling we’ll find out whether or not that’s so.

tmarchman@nysun.com