It’s Christmas week, the informal midpoint of baseball’s offseason.
Roughly two months have elapsed since the World Series. About two months remain before the (supposed) start of spring training.
That means it’s too late to continue reviewing the past season, and it’s too early to look ahead to 2021.
We’re in the doldrums — the dog days of winter, if you will. What better time for aimless debates about players’ skills: the best batters, the best pitchers, the best fielders?
And the best players at getting hit.
Why not? We can all agree — can’t we? — that it takes an unusual mixture of skill, courage, and foolhardiness to get drilled by fastballs over and over and over, a combination possessed by relatively few players in the game’s history.
It may not be the same as leading the majors in home runs or batting average, but somebody takes first place under the heading of HBP (hit by pitch) every year, too. And his name is inscribed in baseball’s record book in precisely the same font.
So, in honor of this unusual skill and this unusual time of year, I present a dozen random facts about the oft-neglected pacesetters in this very specific category:
1. Hughie Jennings reigns as the all-time king of the HBP. He was plunked 287 times during his Hall of Fame career, which stretched continuously from 1891 to 1903, followed by sporadic appearances in six additional games as late as 1918. Jennings attained stardom as a shortstop for the National League’s Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s, reaching his peak with a .401 batting average in 1896. But he led the league in only two categories during his career — sacrifice bunts (once) and getting hit (five times).
2. Fifty-one pitches crashed into Jennings during his magical 1896 season. That remains the single-year record to this day. Jennings was hit more frequently that year than the number of walks he drew (19) or the number of extra-base hits he produced (36).
3. A third distinction for Jennings: He recorded more than 40 HBPs in three seasons, the only player to exceed 40 more than once.
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4. What explains the magnetic connection between Hughie Jennings and the pitched ball? He crowded the plate, for one thing, and he apparently was willing to do anything to get on base. Biographies always point to his personality, variously described as fiery or hard-nosed. “In one game in particular, he was hit in the head by a pitch in the third inning and remarkably, he continued to play the rest of the game,” says the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s website. “But, as soon as it finished, he collapsed and remained unconscious for the three days that followed.”
5. Jennings played the bulk of his career in the 19th century. Craig Biggio, also a Hall of Famer, holds the modern (post-1900) record for getting hit: 285. Only a weak final season prevented Biggio from grabbing the all-time lead. He was zapped just three times in 555 plate appearances for the Astros in 2007. If he had equaled his previous year’s total of nine HBPs, he would have passed Jennings by four in the overall standings.
6. Their career totals are extremely close, but the two leaders were not really equal in the ability to get hit. Jennings played fewer than half as many games as Biggio, so his rate is much more impressive. Here’s how they stack up: Jennings was hit 25.4 times per 500 plate appearances, compared to Biggio’s 11.4 per 500.
7. The two frontrunners were alike in one important regard, despite their uneven rates. They both stood virtually on top of the plate, guaranteeing an unusually high degree of personal contact. “If you stand close to the plate, you're going to get hit, so don't complain about it,” Biggio said.
8. Who in present-day Major League Baseball sets up closest to home plate? Probably Anthony Rizzo, the Cubs first baseman. And who is the career leader among current players in getting hit? Rizzo again, with 155. He seems to take it all in stride. “I don’t like getting hit,” he once said. “But you get on base. If I get hit again, I get hit.”
9. Rizzo is just 31 years old, presumably with plenty of baseball ahead of him. He has been hit 14.3 times per 500 plate appearances since being called up from the minors in 2011, a pace considerably stronger than Biggio’s. If he maintains that rate, as well as his current average of 542 appearances per season, he could break Jennings’s record by 2029, the year he turns 40.
10. No discussion of hit batsmen would be complete without a mention of Ron Hunt, a scrappy second baseman who was plunked 50 times while playing for the Montreal Expos in 1971. That’s the modern record for a single season. Hunt was remarkably balanced that year, getting hit by pitchers from 10 of the other 11 National League teams. The Mets were the most dangerous, hitting him 11 times, while the Pirates were the only club to draw a blank. Hunt admitted that he gave everybody a target. “First I would blouse the uniform — this big, wool uniform, I would make sure it was nice and loose,” he once said. “Then I’d choke way up on the bat, and stand right on top of the plate.”
11. Pitchers deserve a brief mention here, since without them, there wouldn’t be any HBPs. Nobody has ever hit more batters than the 277 struck by Gus Weyhing, who pitched for 11 teams — including such immortal clubs as the Brooklyn Wonders and the Louisville Colonels — between 1887 and 1901. The post-1900 leader is the Big Train himself, Walter Johnson, the mainstay of the Washington Senators staff from 1907 to 1927. Johnson was widely regarded as the fastest pitcher of his era — and perhaps one of the fastest of all time. He drilled 205 batters with his famed fastball.
12. Surprisingly far down the career list is Johnson’s fellow Hall of Famer, Early Wynn, who accumulated only 64 HBPs between 1939 and 1963. Nobody did more than Wynn to cultivate a reputation for sheer orneriness. “I’d knock down my own grandmother if she dug in on me,” he liked to say. So how many times did this paragon of pugnacity lead the American League in hit batters? Not even once in his 23 seasons.