Can Immaculate Grid legend Jesse Chavez name all his teams in order?

February 20th, 2024

You might know Jesse Chavez as a journeyman reliever who has seen a lot of things and been a lot of places over his 16-year big league career. You might also know of him as a very useful Immaculate Grid answer, considering in those 16 years he has played for nine teams, some of them in multiple stints.

So when the 40-year-old Chavez gets put on the spot and is asked to name every team he has played for, in order, you might think he'd have a tough time. You might think he'd stumble over a couple, as you try to recall what restaurant you ordered dinner from last night. Well, you would be wrong.

In an incredibly impressive video the White Sox -- his newest team, with which he recently signed a Minor League deal, in case you had lost track -- posted to TikTok, Chavez was asked to perform this seemingly Sisyphean task for a dollar prize. And he nailed it. The well-traveled reliever even included teams for which he never appeared in the Majors, and the only time he got even briefly tripped up was the 2021-22 period when he signed with the Angels on Feb. 25, 2021, was released by them on March 25, 2021, and then signed with the Braves on April 17 for his second stint with them.

Nobody would have blamed him for getting confused somewhere in there, but Chavez quickly corrected himself and kept going without another hiccup.

Just for some context here, Chavez is the most-traded player in baseball history. ESPN wrote a feature about how he'd been traded nine times in 11 years -- that was in 2018! Since then he's been traded twice more, in the same season of 2022. The transactions section of his pro-baseball reference page is longer than a CVS receipt. And yet he's hung on because he's a veteran presence in the clubhouse who provides consistent innings and has a World Series title to his name.

And, of course, we now know he has A Beautiful Mind-level memory.