- This story begins with Ronald Acuña Jr.
After months of anticipation, the 20-year-old
Acuña was called up to the Braves roster in 2018,
and by August, he was crushing National League
pitching.
On the 12th, he hit his 4th homer in 5 games.
Then, the Marlins came to town and Acuña clobbered
them too, hitting 4 home runs in the first 3
games of the series.
- Which, in the entirety of MLB history,
that was just the
82nd time a player had ever mashed at least eight dingers
within an 8-game stretch of his team's season.
It's something that's occurred well less than once per
season across baseball and its scarcity can be underscored
by the fact that no one in all of MLB did so for the
first 3.5 years of the '90s.
And Acuña ripped off that incredible run at an age
where he couldn't have even bought a beer to celebrate
said accomplishment.
- So, you take the mound
for the 4th and final game of the series.
You've watched Acuña make a mockery of your pitching
staff.
It's the very first pitch of the game.
What do you throw?
If you're Jose Ureña, the answer is this.
A 97 mph fastball, directed right at his elbow.
Acuña left the game shortly thereafter and his streak
was over.
Urena started the game, threw exactly one pitch,
hit a batter with it, and was ejected.
The only time on record this has ever happened.
So, Alex, that was a really crappy thing to do.
It caused him bodily injury, and it was just rotten,
it was nasty, but there's one player who has managed
to take the act of getting hit with a baseball
into a weapon.
And, what is his name?
- Brandon Guyer.
- If you, sorry,
I was thinking of something, sorry we can start that over.
I got too far ahead of myself trying to think of a goof
and I forgot to say words.
- Nice.
(upbeat electronic music)
- Here are just about all the things
that can happen if you step into the batter's box.
Most likely, you'll ground out or you'll pop out.
This has actually been in sharp decline over the last
20 years, because meanwhile it's become more and more
likely that you'll strike out.
In 2019, nearly 23% of all plate appearances ended
with a strikeout, which throughout most of baseball
history, was unimaginable.
In fact, it's gotten so bad there are now more strikeouts
than hits.
Until just a few years ago, there was a chasm between
these two.
As for those hits, there is the single which has
remained pretty stable throughout baseball history,
same with the double.
The triple, meanwhile, is the $2 bill of baseball.
It's the most rare, without being the most valuable.
And it's been waning in popularity since a peak around
1976, but it's still pretty neat.
Up here, of course, we have the dinger.
Like the strikeout, it's kind of flying out of control
these days.
I mean, it's catching up with the double.
If the home run actually becomes more common than both
the double and the triple, we need to replace the
baseball with a handful of Play-doh.
For more charts on this nonsense, you can check out
our Dorktown article, which we'll link in the description,
unless I forgot to.
The non-intentional walk is up here, the intentional walk
is down here.
This is where we get to the really exotic outcomes.
Batters reach base on error about 1% of the time.
The only astronomically rare result is the catcher's
interference, called when the catcher interferes with
the batter's swing.
The batter is then awarded first base free of charge.
This only happens about 20 to 50 times a year across an
entire Major League Baseball season. And finally, we
encounter the entire point of this episode, the hit
by pitch, which happens about 1% of the time.
Being hit by pitches seems like a very strange thing
to claim to be good at, it's like saying you're really
good at birds taking a crap on you.
You're not the one doing it.
If you want to be great at being hit by pitches, the only
agency you have is in crowding the play and leaning
into every stray pitch you can.
So, who wants this crown?
Who wants to be the hit-by-pitch champion?
According to this chart, almost nobody.
Almost nobody.
(mysterious electronic music)
- Through the 2019 season, there have been
over 4,000 players throughout MLB history that have
accumulated at least 1,000 career plate appearances.
One of those is Brandon Guyer, a corner outfielder
who spent most of his career in Tampa. He is also a
man who has lapped the field in the art of getting hit
by a pitch, getting plunked on over 5.7% of his career
plate appearances.
He is, quite simply, the hit-by-pitch god.
If we only count since 1920, the period known as the
live ball era, this becomes even more glaring, with
Derek Dietrich the only other player to even exceed
4% in that century long sample.
To put that in perspective, the average player in this
time had only about a 0.63% chance of getting hit
on each trip to the dish.
But there are two seasons in particular that
demand closer inspection.
The first is 2015.
(dramatic bass plays)
That year, Guyer got a painful ride to first 6.23%
of the time.
Among players with at least 300 plate appearances,
it was far and away the highest mark in MLB that season.
In fact, only three other players were hit even half
as frequently.
My favorite part of his 2015 season, though, was in early
August, when he was hit by a pitch in four straight games.
While impressive, that's not unprecedented.
But what makes Guyer's streak so remarkable is that
he only played the entirety of one of those four games.
In the first, his back leg got clipped by this Chris
Sale slider before getting lifted in the 6th inning.
He played all of the next game, in the process absorbing
this fastball to his front leg courtesy of
Carlos Rodon.
Upon returning home from Chicago, Guyer
entered their subsequent contest in the 7th
inning to hit for Daniel Nava, taking another
fastball to that left leg from Eric O'Flaherty.
In the following night, he was summoned in the 5th
to hit for Nava, with this errant Sean Gilmartin breaking
ball grazing Guyer's foot, marking the only time anyone's
recorded pinch-hit-by-pitches in back to back games.
But Guyer's 2015 season was just a table-setter, an appetizer
for the delicious, exquisitely prepared, gourmet entree
that was to come.
Because as impressive as getting hit once every 16 plate
appearances is, that was only good for the live-ball era's
2nd-most proficient season of beaning.
And that leads us to the next year.
A year in which Guyer would remove any and all doubt
about his preternatural abilities.
(dramatic bass plays)
In that ensuing 2016 season, despite missing most of June
with a bum hammy, he was hit by 20 pitches by the All-Star
break.
That was more than the entire Cleveland organization.
So, surely to boost those numbers, they traded for him
a few weeks later.
He finished the year as only the 5th player in the
live-ball era to be hit by more than 30 pitches in a
season.
In fact, despite being a platoon player, missing a
month with injury, and only starting 80 games, he still
finished the season having been hit by nearly as many
pitches as the Oakland A's.
- I decided to butt in here and make another chart,
because this is just obnoxious.
Here we have the hit-by-pitch totals of every other
Major League Baseball team in 2016.
Guyer, by himself, is down here.
So, while he didn't quite eclipse any entire team
all by himself, he did come really close.
Thing is, these teams needed 6,000+
plate appearances to get here.
An individual's full season measures around just
700 plate appearances.
Guyer didn't even get half that many.
In just half a season, he got hit roughly as often
as many entire teams get hit, across an entire season.
- And with only 345 plate appearances, that meant Guyer
was hit every 11.1 times he went up to bat, shattering
the all-time record for hit-by-pitch percentage at
an exorbitant 8.99.
- It's nuts to me that a rule meant to protect hitters
like Guyer was actually used by Guyer as a weapon.
In this chart, we see the on-base percentage of every
batter in 2016 with a minimum of 300 plate appearances.
Brandon Guyer ranks 28th of 268, so he's basically in the
top tier, getting on base more often than the vast majority
of hitters.
I mean, he's right there with Bryce Harper and
Christian Yelich, and better than the likes of
Jose Bautista and Mookie Betts.
But where do you think he is without all his
hit-by-pitches?
By this I don't just mean we replace all his hit-by-pitches
with outs, because that would be too easy.
I mean we play it fair, we take those plate appearances
off the book like they never happened.
If we do that, Guyer falls all the way from number 28
to number 191.
By virtue of his ability to stand there and get smacked
by a baseball, Brandon Guyer ascended from one of the worst
on-base hitters in baseball to one of the very best.
- Also in that 2016 season, he had two particularly fun
stretches.
One was his first 60 plate appearances of the year,
during which he was hit by a pitch 10 times.
The other, was his encounters with his former teammate,
Boston's David Price.
On April 21st, part of the aforementioned cluster, Price
drilled Guyer with not one, but two fastballs.
In their June rematch, Guyer responded by launching
not one, but two extra base hits off Price.
And in their personal July rubber match, Price again
plunked Guyer with not one, but two
more fastballs.
There's another eyepopping element to Guyer's 2016 season.
In baseball, there are two ways to reach first base
without swinging the bat.
One can either draw a walk or be hit by a pitch.
Any time someone gets to take a leisurely stroll to
first base, there's approximately a 93% chance it's
due to a walk.
Guyer in 2016 reached base without swinging the bat
50 times, meaning the expected distribution would be
that he drew roughly 46 and a half walks, while being hit
by three and a half pitches.
But again, in reality that hit-by-pitch number stood
at 31, and was juxtaposed against just 19 walks.
Which means, absolutely nothing about Guyer could be
characterized as expected.
For context, there have only been two other instances
in the live-ball era of a player exceeding his walk
total in hit-by-pitches.
Guyer nearly doubled it.
- If you're looking for weird people, this is
how you strike gold.
You correctly identify the weirdness of Brandon
Guyer's career, and then you try to find those who had
careers like his.
Let's chart every player to get hit at least 50 times
as a percentage of all the times they ever got on base
for any reason.
Does that make sense?
The ones near the top are the ones who, like Guyer,
actually depended on the hit-by-pitch as a way to
get on base, turning it into something more than a
freak occurrence.
These are the true beanball masters.
This is where the weirdos are.
It's a pretty strange way to play, so it makes sense
to see so many completely bizarre stories.
Here's Tommy Tucker, who in a game in 1894, got in
a brawl with John McGraw.
Who knows what really happened for sure here, but it's
reported that fans were too busy watching the fight to
notice that somebody had started a fire in
the stands.
By the time the fire alarm was pulled it was too late.
The fire burned down the stadium, as well as more than
a hundred buildings in the area.
Here's Hughie Jennings, who you could write a book
about.
Among a million other things, Jennings once
nose-dived into a swimming pool and fractured his
skull.
Turned out, the pool was empty.
He was ultimately fined and played many more seasons
of baseball after that.
Here's Dick Padden, whose name is Dick Padden.
Here's Minnie Minoso, who began his pro career in
Cuba in 1943.
He made it to the Majors a few years later playing
in the '50s and '60s.
And the '70s, when he came back to play
three more games at age 50.
And the '80s, when he came back at age 54 for
two more games.
And the '90s, when he briefly played with
the independent St. Ball Saints at age 67 as a
publicity stunt.
And the 2000s, when he joined the Saints again and
drew a walk at age 77.
Here's Fernando Viña, a decidedly average player
who was great at getting hit with everything, not
just baseballs.
Here he is fielding a routine grounder to tag out
Albert Belle.
He recovered, and would go on to appear in the "Welcome
to Atlanta" remix video with the Saint Lunatics for
reasons known only to God.
And here's Kelly Shoppach, who at age 32, finally
stole the first and only base of his career by running
approximately 87 feet and then doing
that.
Here he slides like a man who has never slid
and has never seen anyone slide, but has kinda had
the act of sliding very badly described to him.
And the king of all these strange people, is our buddy
Brandon Guyer.
An otherwise normal-seeming person, who, to an extent
baseball has never before seen, willingly uses
his own body as a human baseball bat.
Alex and I would like to thank you for watching Dorktown.
If you missed the last episode, the tragedy of the
2010 San Diego Chargers, it's just right up there
up the street.
And finally, if you own a window-mounted air conditioning
unit, I'd like to urge you to remove it as cold weather
approaches.
The damage the cold can do to your A/C unit is nothing
compared to the spike in your energy bill, since those
things tend to leak a lot of heat.
You'll be glad you did.