In Monday night’s episode of Teen Mom OG, Amber Portwood and her fiance Matt Baier took her daughter Leah to the batting cages. While Matt took his turn swinging, Amber mentioned to MTV producers that Matt used to play semi-pro baseball. “There are pictures and everything,” Amber assures the producers, who look a bit doubtful.
I have to confess that my face was very similar to that of the producers, given Matt’s track record of fudging the truth about his past. But, earlier today I took to the internet to check out his story, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t turn up photos of Matt playing in the All Star game of the Boston Men’s Baseball League in both 2001 and 2002!
Matt “Varitek” Baier had a whopping .528 batting average heading into the 2001 All Star game, and the next year he went into the break with an even better .556 average! I did a little more research, and it looks as though the teams in the league play a 24 game schedule, which I assume means that there were 12 games played prior to the All Star game. During that 12-game stretch in 2002, Matt scored nine runs and had six RBI. Pretty amazing! (Unless the typical scores in those games were of the 36-32 softball variety.)
There’s not a ton of information about Matt’s “Glory Days” on the diamond, although I cannot complain given the amount of info that is there from fifteen years ago — including several photos of Matt in his Reds and Brewers uniforms:
Now, before we give Matt too much credit, I should point out that the Boston Men’s Baseball League clearly identifies itself as an amateur league, which is not a “semi-pro league” as described by Amber in the episode. I seriously doubt Amber would have made the error and come up with a term like “semi-pro” out of thin air, so I assume that is what Matt told her. That being said, Matt was over 30 at the time he was playing in the Boston Men’s League, so it is very possible he was with a semi-pro team before then. (Matt’s old enough to have played baseball as a young man prior to the internet being a thing, so it would make since that there is no evidence online.)
* No, the baseball card at the top of this post is not real. Since we gave the kids of Teen Mom their own baseball cards, I thought it only fitting to award Matt the same honor.
