Carl Crawford distributes iPads with "highlight reel" to prospective teams

In reality, he's not sending these out to all 30 teams. The first line in the article even states to prospective teams. I'd wager 8-12 teams are getting these.

Each at-bat is worth more because each time you come to the plate isn't considered an at-bat; it's considered a plate appearance. If, in a game with four plate appearances, he walked, got hit by a pitch, got awarded first base due to catcher obstruction, and hit a sacrifice fly, he would technically have zero at-bats.

(But I doubt if his iPad-enabled highlight reel is filled with footage of him getting hit by pitches.)

But the real question is whether he'll earn more money as a result of this stunt. If his salary does not change at all from what it would have been had he approached this in the normal fashion then this money is a complete loss.

Of course this is impossible to calculate; it could be argued that his value doesn't change just because his highlights show up on an iPad, it could also be argued that whatever team picks him up will enjoy some amount of extra publicity as a result of this and thus they'll be willing to increase their offer. Who knows.

Each at-bat is worth more than 33.3k if you take into account the average number of games Carl is likely to be rested each season.

Or if his team makes the playoffs each year the at-bats would be worth slightly less.

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Now if only MLB would finally decide to just allow us to in-app purchase a subscription for each season so I don't have a hundred MLB apps lying around after a few years.

Yeah evan, your right. Seems TUAW misquoted somewhere along the line. The original source puts it as, "In other words, they’ll literally get the iPad money back and then some the second Crawford steps to the plate for his new team."

If it's $33k/at bat, wouldn't that mean the iPads are paid off halfway through the first at bat?