Understand this: Tim Tebow is a bad minor league baseball player. He mustered only a .648 OPS at Class A Columbia before his promotion this week, one of the lowest marks on the team and well below league-average for the South Atlantic League, and he committed as many outfield errors as the rest of the club’s outfielders combined. And that’s incredible.

Tim Tebow started playing professional baseball at age 29 after spending more than ten years out of the sport entirely. He benefited, certainly, from the athleticism that made him a star college quarterback and a lousy NFL one, and from hitting lessons at the hands of experts like Gary Sheffield and Daniel Murphy. But he came into the 2017 season with only a handful of Arizona Fall League and spring-training games under his belt since high school, opened the year in full-season Class A ball, and did not perform as the single worst player in the league.

Do you understand how difficult that is? Every single dude playing in Class A ball recently showed enough to professional big-league talent evaluators to suggest they might someday be Major Leaguers. Every pitcher throws in the mid-90s or possesses excellent control or features a wicked breaking ball. Every guy on the field is almost inconceivably better at baseball than you and me and most everyone we’ve ever met, and Tim Tebow just dropped in and managed 47 hits and three homers with a decent walk rate in his first 244 chances at the level. Again, by the standards held for professional baseball players in the South Atlantic League, it was not good. But by the standards of average civilians it’s completely astonishing. (Michael Jordan’s 1994 pro-baseball pursuit was also a remarkable feat, but while Jordan played at a higher level than Tebow, he entered baseball as arguably the greatest athlete of all-time and left it as the worst regular player in the Class AA Southern League that season.)

The Mets promoted Tebow to their Class A Advanced team in St. Lucie, Fla., this week. His career there opened with a rainout Tuesday, but he is expected to make his debut at the level on Wednesday afternoon. The promotion came with tons of cynicism, some of it understandable and some of it stemming from this very author: Since Tebow was among the worst players on the team at Columbia, it seems very likely that the move is geared more toward selling tickets than it is rewarding a minor leaguer for his performance.

But to that cynicism: Tebow is hardly the first minor leaguer to find himself moving up a level despite underwhelming on-field production. Logistics alone force it all the time: Bad pitchers called up for spot starts to allow more prized prospects to rest, crummy catchers playing far above their levels because someone else got hurt. Unlike some of those guys, Tebow will likely see regular playing time at his new level and doesn’t seem tracked to return to Columbia. But since none of the other outfielders at Columbia was significantly outplaying Tebow — at least not on offense — it hardly seems an egregious slight to any of them to give Tebow the call.

Is it a stunt to sell tickets? Well, yes, of course. But minor league teams also sometimes employ dogs as batboys or make all the players dress up like pizza for a game. Tebow represents a different sort of promotional tool than most, since it comes in the form of — and perhaps at the cost of — actual, meaningful on-field play. In the case of the Florida State League that Tebow now joins, though, it doesn’t seem like the worst idea from a player-development standpoint.

Check this out: The website BaseballPilgrimages.com collected attendance data for every minor league during the 2016 season. The Florida State League, notorious among minor league ballplayers for the brutal humidity and frequent rainouts and empty stadiums, drew far fewer fans to an average game than any other league besides the Rookie-level Appalachian league, the lowest-level circuit at which minor league teams charge attendance. Three teams (one of which, to be fair, was playing in a temporary home park) averaged less than 1,000 tickets sold per game. Most players at that level played in front of larger crowds at earlier stops in their minor-league careers, and many played for more people in college, in summer amateur wood-bat leagues, and in high-school showcases.

Few baseball players reach the Class A Advanced level without a heck of a lot of intrinsic motivation, but fewer still would say they prefer playing in empty ballparks. At the outset of what will inevitably be a long, muggy, sweaty, exhausting summer in one of the affiliated minor leagues’ gloomiest circuits, the Mets just presented every St. Lucie player the opportunity to show off their skills in front of packed stadiums of enthusiastic fans. If they’re just there to see Tim Tebow, so what? They’re still there.

And when you look at it that way, it hardly seems like a purely mercenary decision. Money will be made off Tebow, of course, and since the Mets own the St. Lucie affiliate, maybe money is even the primary motivating factor in his promotion. But there will be benefits beyond that, certainly, for the young players who have not yet had the chance to share a clubhouse and a playing field with a respected and wildly popular athlete, and who do not yet necessarily understand the full breadth of everything that comes along with it.

It’s a credit to Tebow, undoubtedly, that he played well enough at Columbia to let the Mets promote him to a location — it’s the Florida State League, after all — especially primed for yet another round of Tebowmania. He was not in any way a good South Atlantic League player, but played well enough to let his team further capitalize on his name without alienating or humiliating the real outfield prospects in their system.