Rhys Hoskins’ Secret to Infield Hit Immortality

The other day, I wrote about Jake McCarthy’s BABIP, and touched on an assumption about which kinds of hitters are going to put up outlier numbers in that stat. McCarthy hits a lot of grounders, which generally produce a higher BABIP than fly balls (though they’re less productive by other metrics). He’s also left-handed and very fast, which means he ought to be able to beat out grounders for infield singles.

So let’s take a little gander at the infield hit rate leaderboard for qualified hitters. This is the percentage of groundballs a batter produces that turn into infield hits. Simple enough:

So yeah, Bellinger is primarily known for grinding hanging curveballs to make his bread, but in spite of his size, he is a left-handed fast guy. That tracks. Peña is a righty, but he’s very fast. His average home-to-first time is actually in the top 20 among all hitters — lefties and righties alike — this season. And because Peña hits so many grounders, he leads all batters in total infield hits with 24.

And then there’s Rhys Hoskins. Wait, what?

Hoskins has one of the lowest groundball rates in the league — fifth-lowest out of 140 qualified hitters out of this writing — but that means his 10 infield hits make up a stunning 13.2% of his total grounders. That’s third best in baseball.

As a player, Hoskins is the anti-McCarthy. He’s a right-handed hitting first baseman and DH who, according to Baseball Savant, has ninth-percentile sprint speed. Poppycock, says I. More than 600 players have registered at least one plate appearance in the majors this season. Are we meant to believe that there are 50 current major leaguers who are slower than Hoskins? I think if you surveyed Easter Island you’d have a hard time finding 50 moai that are slower than Hoskins.

And this guy is beating out a higher percentage of groundballs than Bobby Witt Jr. and other fast guys? Is he getting lucky or is there something going on here?

Well, 10 infield hits is a small enough number that I went back and watched all of them. You can too, if you like. Here’s what I found.

Four of them were hard-hit grounders down the third base line. On two of those, the third baseman couldn’t get a strong throw off. On another, Oswaldo Cabrera tries to Roger Dorn it and it goes off his glove. Gotta get your body in front of the ball, kid! On the fourth, Jared Triolo makes a great play and would’ve thrown Hoskins out had Rowdy Tellez not completely given up on trying to field the throw and hold the bag.

The others are a combination of weird hops or dinks into no-man’s land. There was a 33 mph lob over Justin Steele’s shoulder that looked like a perfectly placed rugby kick. Another ball went off the tip of Elly De La Cruz’s glove, but would’ve been an out had the Reds not been playing the infield in while down 7-0 with one out in the third inning. You’re not fooling anyone.

My working theory was that Hoskins was benefiting from infielders not expecting him to hit groundballs. (Surprise is, after all, one of the key weapons of the Spanish Inquisition.) Maybe some of those grounders would go against the shift or wander into unguarded territory.

That definitely happened one or two times, but my main takeaway from watching Hoskins’ infield hits is that I now 100% believe the conspiracy theory that MLB is instructing official scorers not to award errors, in order to artificially inflate the league-wide batting average and make it look like the shift ban is more effective than it actually is. Out of these 10 hits, I personally would’ve scored three errors and would hear arguments to that effect on as many as five.

Taking off the tin foil batting helmet for the time being, the real reason Hoskins’ infield hit rate is so high is a quirk of the stat. The denominator is not infield groundballs, but total groundballs. An extreme fly ball hitter like Hoskins doesn’t put that many balls on the ground, but those he does hit on the ground don’t get through to the outfield.

Remember, an infield hit isn’t the best-case scenario for a grounder — an outfield hit is.

Only 12.2% of Hoskins’ grounders get to feel the freedom of the outfield grass along their seams. That’s less than half of Bellinger’s rate. Even so, he’s still getting a lot of infield hits for a slow guy. Hoskins’ batting average on infield grounders is .154, which is 39th out of 330 hitters with at least 50 groundballs. Even with the occasional favorable scoring decision, he shouldn’t be doing this.

There’s another right-handed slugger, an extreme fly-ball guy, who’s dining out on infield grounders even more than Hoskins is: Adam Duvall. Duvall doesn’t have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, but if we lower the plate appearances threshold to 250 (Duvall is at 317), the Braves outfielder becomes the Aaron Judge of infield hit rate.

Duvall’s infield hit rate is 23.7%; even with the lowered playing time standard, nobody’s within five points of him. Only two others are even above 15%. Duvall, unlike Hoskins, is capable of outrunning a tectonic plate, but this is still a shocking number.

My original theory about surprise grounders doesn’t seem to hold water, but it’s not that far off from the truth. With that playing time threshold, Duvall boasts one of the 10 lowest GB/FB ratios in the game. Like Hoskins, any groundball Duvall hits is a surprise. But perhaps more relevant to the issue at hand: Every grounder he hits is a mistake.

When a more grounder-compatible hitter, like Peña, hits one on the deck, there’s a decent chance he’s made solid contact. When Duvall or Hoskins does it, the ball is coming off the bat pretty softly and not at a weird angle.

And while this sounds counterintuitive, anyone who’s watched more than a handful of baseball games in their life knows it’s true: If a groundball is hit hard, it had better get through the infield. Because if it doesn’t, in most cases all that added velocity does is give the fielder more time to make an out. Sometimes two.

So out of those 330 hitters with at least 50 grounders this season, Duvall is 314th in average exit velo on infield grounders; Hoskins is 321st. On all grounders, Duvall is 321st in exit velo; Hoskins is 329th.

Remember that last table? Let’s expand it to include exit velocity numbers for both infield and total grounders, and rope in Duvall, as well as Oneil Cruz, who ranks no. 1 in baseball in hitting the hardest groundballs:

Big ups to Bellinger, who is not only getting 27% of his grounders into the outfield (one of the highest marks in baseball) but also beating out the highest percentage of infield grounders. Bellinger and Witt have lapped the field in groundball productivity, hitting .432 and .422, respectively, while the league as a whole is hitting .246.

Anyway, because Cruz is hitting the ball so hard, he’s getting an exceptionally high percentage of grounders through the infield. But despite his plus-plus speed, Cruz is basically dead in the water if an infielder gets his glove on the ball. Hoskins, who could only beat Cruz in a footrace from home to first if Cruz had to run the bases backwards, has nearly doubled the Pirates shortstop’s batting average on infield grounders. And it’s not just Cruz; the top nine hitters in average exit velo for infield grounders (and 14 of the top 15) are batting under .100 on those balls.

Hey, maybe we’ve just stumbled on a new market inefficiency: If you’re going to hit the ball on the ground, hit it softly! Well, not really. First of all, Cruz is still hitting for a higher average than either Duvall or Hoskins on total grounders — again, you want to get the ball through the infield. Second, I charted groundball hard-hit rate against infield grounder batting average and came up with the following:

See a correlation? No? That’s because there isn’t one. Hoskins’ and Duvall’s ability to reach base on infield hits is a nice bonus for two guys who need to get on base any way they can. And it might even be repeatable, as both of them had multiple seasons of double-digit infield hits even heading into 2024. But it’s not the secret to everlasting on-base glory. You still want to try to hit the ball hard; just know that sometimes, things work out even when you don’t.