Leo Jiménez’s ‘The Beaning of Life’

A ballplayer who grabs a bat and steps up to the plate aims to hit. The point of the sport is to go around the bases, and the most efficient way to do that is to put wood on the ball and hope for the best. But it’s far from the only way to go around the bases.

Sometimes you hit the ball, and sometimes the ball hits you. I’ve long been fascinated by players who use their own bodies as a means of advancement, dating back to when I, as a child, read a George Vecsey feature on the single-season hit-by-pitch leader in an old anthology of baseball writing. “Ron Hunt, Loner,” painted a broadly ambivalent portrait of a second baseman with modest physical gifts. But Hunt made two All-Star teams and retired with the same career OBP as Shohei Ohtani, despite playing in the most pitcher-friendly era of the past 100 years.

Those who are able to systematize the hit-by pitch can transform their careers.

Brandon Guyer, one of my favorite random players of the 2010s, was a master of freezing on a back-foot breaking ball and became a must-start platoon player on a pennant-winning team. One of Guyer’s teammates in Cleveland was a young Francisco Lindor, who’s worn 10 or more pitches three years running. Lindor’s 12 enplunkenings represent a small fraction of his value this year, but not a trivial one. How strong would Lindor’s MVP case be if his OBP were in the .320s instead of .340, as it is now?

But Lindor is sort of like a Craig Biggio or Chase Utley. Sure, he gets this small but meaningful OBP bonus by getting hit by lots of pitches, but that’s not why he’s a great player. He’s one of the best defensive shortstops out there, he’s going to either go 30/30 or get very close, and he’s going to finish the season with more than 80 extra-base hits. That’s a superstar if he doesn’t get hit once.

I’m interested in guys for whom getting hit by pitches is the difference between having a major league career and not. Hunt is the most extreme historical example, but how close do modern players come?

These are the 10 hitters for whom the hit-by-pitch makes up the highest percentage of their total times on base (hits plus walks plus HBPs). The league-average OBP this year is .312, a mark half of these 10 players meet or exceed on their overall stats. Three others are within a few points of average. But if you consider only plate appearances in which the batter was not hit by a pitch, only one of these 10 hitters, Matt Wallner, has a league-average OBP. That remains true even if you lower the standard to the league-average OBP without HBPs, which is .304.

I expected to see some of these names in the top 10. Friedl is the ultimate by-any-means-necessary hitter, in that he’s got the ability to hit in the high .200s with double-digit home run power, but he’s constantly bunting and leaning into pitches and doing all that John McGraw stuff that went out of fashion when pitchers learned how to throw 90 mph. Cavan Biggio is in the top 10, because Biggios have evolved over tens of thousands of years to have a genetic predisposition to stand right on top of the plate.

But what’s going on with Leo Jiménez? This diminutive Blue Jays infielder has been hit by 13 pitches in 173 plate appearances. That’s a hit-by-pitch in 7.5% of his plate appearances. In 1971, Hunt sent the all-time single-season record by getting plunked 50 times — FIFTY TIMES — in a single season. That year, he got hit in 7.8% of his plate appearances. This season, 22.4% of Jiménez’s times on base have been due to his getting hit. In Hunt’s record season, got hit in 19.8% of his times on base.

Jiménez sets up fairly close to the plate, but he’s not standing right on the inside line of the batter’s box.

Compare that to the position of Luis García Jr., who has more plate appearances this season than any other hitter who hasn’t been hit by a pitch.

But after the pitch gets thrown, Jiménez uses his elbow guard the way you’d use a shield if you were facing a mass of English longbowmen across a medieval battlefield. His batting stance puts his elbow in the perfect position to intercept a slightly wayward two-seamer from a right-handed pitcher. Of the 13 pitches that have hit Jiménez this season, 12 have impacted him in the hands or arms. One of those probably would’ve hit him in the ribs if he hadn’t dropped his elbow to take it on the pad, but the other 11 he came by honestly.

Actually, “honestly” is probably not the right word. Because after watching all 13 plunkings in quick succession, I was confused. I thought I had misremembered the exact wording of the rule regarding a hitter’s duty to get out of the way of a pitch. Maybe I’d gotten it mixed up with the NCAA hit-by-pitch rule, which has changed a few times in the past 15 years.

So I opened the rulebook and turned to the section titled “When the Batter Becomes a Runner.” (Then I wasted about five minutes amusing myself by singing the section header in the style of Percy Sledge. No reason this can’t be fun.)

Anyway, here’s Rule 5.05(b)(2):

“The batter becomes a runner and is entitled to first base without liability to be put out (provided he advances to and touches first base) when… He is touched by a pitched ball which he is not attempting to hit unless (A) The ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, or (B) The batter makes no attempt to avoid being touched by the ball…”

I know the enforcement of 5.05(b)(2)(B) is capricious. A batter frequently gets credit for trying to “dodge” a pitch by turning his back to present a less painful portion of his anatomy for impact, while doing absolutely bupkis to move or reduce his target profile. But Jiménez isn’t even doing that. I’d say he made an attempt to get out of the way in maybe one out of those 13 HBPs.

In a few instances Jiménez moved to take the pitch on his elbow guard instead of a more sensitive region, which, as I’ve said, counts as ducking and dodging the way this rule gets enforced. But in at least four of the 13, Jiménez got hit by a pitch while moving his hands toward the ball as part of a load or a checked swing.

I have no idea how he keeps getting away with this, except that it’s a split-second decision that umpires, even at their most attention-seeking, don’t like to make. Just as the Seattle Seahawks kept making the Super Bowl because they knew the refs wouldn’t call defensive holding on every play (Meg’s on vacation so I can get away with saying this), or Kevin Garnett knew the refs would get tired of calling moving screens, Jiménez is daring the umps to make a rare and frequently unpopular call, and they keep not doing it.

If nobody’s going to make that call, why would Jiménez stop chucking his elbow in front of every sinker that misses the inside corner? It’s made him an above-average offensive player as a .226 hitter with a 6.9% walk rate. The most striking way I can express the extremity of Jiménez’s pitch-seeking is by expressing his HBPs as a percentage of the total pitches he’s seen that have been off the plate and inside.

League-wide, a pitch that’s inside off the plate has a 1.58% chance of hitting the batter. For right-handed hitters, that number’s a little higher: 1.74%. Either way, that’s one hit batter for every 60 inside pitches, give or take.

Jiménez is wearing roughly one out of every 11 pitches that misses the zone inside, which is the highest mark in baseball by an enormous margin. That’s how he’s getting hit more than he’s walking — no other player with 100 or more plate appearances can say the same — and how he’s running a ratio of just 2.5 hits for every HBP. Those are “He can’t keep getting away with this!” numbers.

Surely some of this wackiness comes from Jiménez being less than 200 plate appearances into his major league career. But early indications are that this man has turned getting hit by a pitch into an art, and turned his elbow pad into an instrument of divine poetry. We’ll see how far this elite skill can carry him. To first base at the very least.