If Whitney Houston played baseball: starting pitcher, rated 83

Whitney Houston as a baseball player: scouting report

Whitney Houston sang The Star Spangled Banner before Super Bowl XXV in 1991, and many fans still call it the finest anthem ever performed at a game. She already knows how to own a stadium. In this game she would own it from the mound as a starting pitcher. Her pitching is the best mark on her card alongside her eye, and her voice was the perfect model for the job: enormous range, total control and the judgment to save the biggest note for the moment that needed it.

She learned to sing in a church choir in Newark, New Jersey, and that early training in breath and discipline shows up in the way she would sequence pitches, building through an at bat the way she built through a ballad. I Will Always Love You, from The Bodyguard, opens quietly and finishes in a blaze, and a great start works the same way: patience in the early innings, everything she has in the late ones. Her contact and fielding both grade out well, so she can handle the bunt play and hold her own with a bat in her hands.

Power is her soft spot, and it barely matters on the mound. Her speed is modest too, so do not plan on using her as a pinch runner. Second base and catcher are her next best spots, though both fall well short of what she does as a pitcher, so this is a player you draft for the rotation and leave there. She had seven straight number one singles in the 1980s, a record, and drafters should expect that same consistency start after start.

Plays like A poised starter with pinpoint command of a deep arsenal

Put Whitney Houston in your lineup

12 rolls, nine hitters and a rotation, 162 games. Can you win 117? Free, no account.