OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

This question hinges on the idea of generalization. There's a huge gap when the fact pattern leaps from discussing Jason to reaching a conclusion about the entire Mudskippers baseball team. The total lack of information about whether other Mudskippers players might be deserving is a problem that will have to be remedied in order to strengthen the argument.

Answer A makes a valiant attempt in this regard; if most of the Mudskippers players are terrible, and we're given that only great players are deserving, then certainly most of the Mudskippers players are undeserving. However, the conclusion is that none of the players are deserving, and it's quite plausible that some Mudskippers could be deserving even if most are not.

Answer B plays on mental inertia; students may speculate that players embroiled in cheating scandals should not be named All-Stars, but nothing in the argument ever specifies this fact. Without support in the argument, we cannot conclude that this information would render the Mudskippers players undeserving.

Answer C recognizes that a comparison could be used to connect Jason with the rest of the Mudskippers team. However, this answer choice subtly misses the conclusion of the argument. The question isn't whether the players will be selected for the team -- it's whether any of the players deserve to be selected. Thus, answer C doesn't really address the gap in the argument at all.

Answer D is the correct answer. If Jason is the best player on his baseball team, then every other Mudskippers player is worse than Jason himself. But we already know that Jason, because of his excessive strikeout rate, is not a truly great baseball player. Thus, none of Jason's inferior teammates are truly great players either. And only great players deserve to be chosen. So D does, in fact, strengthen the conclusion that none of the Mudskippers deserve to be All-Stars.

Answer E again misses the conclusion. Whether the Mudskippers will play has nothing to do with whether any of them are deserving of selection for the All-Star team.

D is correct.
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Don't agree totally with the explanation.
The steam gives a very precise way to classify a "trully great baseball player": someone who doesn't "strikes out that often". Steam also brings that the requirement to be on the All star team is be a "trully great player".

D gives me an absolute statment that does not guarantee that any of the other players would fit the classification of "trully great player" - A player can, for instance, be the best on striking, but still don't be the best player - on this case, he would deserve to be selected to All Star Team, by the requirements definition.

C, on the other hand, brings a direct comparision between Jason and the rest of the team, saying that the others would be even less likely to join. Regardless the reason for that (probably they are worse than Jason on striking), It gives a better ground to guarantee that no other player can be classified as "trully great player" (as Jason already cannot be classified), and, by that, cannot join the All Star Team.

So, with this reasoning, C is the best answear for this one.

i am confused between C and D.
I feel C is also a good contender.
The other players on Jason’s team are even less likely to be named to the All-Star team this year than is Jason himself.: that means if it is not Jason there is no other player also.
However D says Jason is the best player but the argument never says that only best play should go in league
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Dear GMATNinja nightblade354 gmat1393

Could you please look at this question.
It seems that answer should be C.

No, as per veritasprep , answer is D
even i checked the question back at veritas it is D
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There's a glaring problem with C that's subtle but really important. The argument is all about who is DESERVING of being on the all-star team:

so none of the Mudskippers players deserve to be selected as All-Stars this year


But C is only about who is LIKELY to be named to the all-star team. And that's not the same thing as being deserving (we don't know, for example, that the process for naming people to the team has anything to do with being deserving (maybe it's a random drawing, maybe it's voting done by players so it turns into a "who's more popular" contest, etc.). That word shift is subtle but really important: we need to determine who's deserving, not who's likely, and all we know is that 1) Jason is not deserving, and 2) anyone who strikes out more than half the time is not deserving because they're not a great player.

Where D comes in is that it's much more closely tied to the argument (in which "great player" and "deserving" are linked). We know that Jason is not a great player by definition, and so if everyone else on his team is less great than he is, then none of them are great players and so none deserve to be named all-stars.

Functionally this is a generalization issue: we only know about one player on the Mudskippers, Jason, and the conclusion makes a claim about all the players. In a generalization case, a good answer choice candidate is one that can draw a line that begins or ends at the one case you know about (all other data points are greater than or less than the one you know...at that point you're much more likely to be able to draw a conclusion about "all" because the one data point tells you something about all of them).
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VeritasKarishma i don't really understand the difference b/w likely and deserving as given in option C and in question respectively...please help!

Aviral1995 - Brian has taken this exact point in detail in his comment above so do go through that.

Also, note what the argument says:
Jason hit 3 home runs in a game.
But he struck out more than half the time over the season so he is not great.
Only great players deserve to be chosen for the team.

Conclusion: None of the Mudskippers players deserve to be selected as All-Stars this year.

Do you see how the whole argument is about Jason and then the conclusion says "no player deserves to be selected".
What will help our conclusion? Something that connects the whole team to not being good enough.

(D) does just that. It tells you that others are even worse than Jason. Then no one deserves to be on the team.

As for
(C) The other players on Jason’s team are even less likely to be named to the All-Star team this year than is Jason himself.
The entire argument is about who is good enough to deserve a spot on the team, not about who is likely to be on the team. We don't know how the players are selected so we don't know how they are "likely" to be selected. Are they selected based on how good they are? We don't know.
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Type: Strengthen the conclusion

Frequent strike-outs ---> not a great player
only great players---> deserve spot on all star team

Conclusion: none of the Mudskippers players deserve to be selected as All-Stars this year.

(A) Most of the Mudskippers players are truly terrible baseball players - ''most'' does not mean 'all'.
(B) The entire Mudskippers team is currently embroiled in a major cheating scandal. - irrelevant to the passage.
(C) The other players on Jason’s team are even less likely to be named to the All-Star team this year than is Jason himself. - ''likelihood'' is not discussed in the passage. Besides, (C) does not help us establish the conclusion of the passage.
(D) Jason is the best player on his baseball team. - if Jason is the best player on the team, yet he cannot be considered worthy of a spot on the All star team, then we can infer that the other players of Jason's team would never earn a spot on the all star team, since they (the other players) are not as talented/capable as Jason in baseball. Hence, (D) strengthens the conclusion cited. Therefore, (D) is the right answer choice.
(E) The other Mudskippers players will refuse to play for the All-Star team unless Jason is selected. - irrelevant to the passage.

It's barely an argument at all, as it stands. It's like saying "Jason works for ABC Ltd. Jason is a bad employee. Therefore all employees at ABC are bad." There's no basis for that conclusion -- the facts only support the conclusion "one employee is bad".

It only becomes an argument if we have some reason to think our assessment of Jason can be generalized to our assessment of his team or company. Only answers C and D even remotely accomplish that here. The official replies above point out the "word shift" from the argument to answer C, and that shift is important -- the fact that someone is "likely to be selected" may have nothing to do with whether the person deserves to be selected. D is the best answer, but it still suffers from the same problem. There is a "word shift" in D too, from "truly great" to "best". That shift is problematic; here, the concept of "true greatness" is at least partly defined in the stem, and the author of the argument seems to have an idiosyncratic definition of what it means (it has something to do with not striking out too much). Is the concept of "better" or "best" defined the same way? We have no way to know. In real life, if a player struck out 60% of the time and hit home runs 40% of the time, he or she would be the best baseball player in history. The author of the argument would not consider that player "truly great", however.

So I don't really care for the OA either, even though it's clearly better than the other choices. The whole problem, from the logical structure ("If A is true then B is true and if B is true then C is true") to the nebulously defined terms ("truly great", "best"), resembles something you might see on the LSAT, not something you'd see on the GMAT. GMAT CR questions tend to deal in concrete facts and evidence.
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