Baseball's Best Dodgeball Players

By Bill


In 10,876 plate appearances, Craig Biggio was able to take first base 285 times after being hit by a pitch (2.6% of his plate appearances). Hughie Jennings came up just 5,639 times, but was hit a record 287 times (5.1%).

I think of Luis Castillo as a similar type of player, if not quite the same quality, as Biggio (and as Jennings, if I've ever stopped to picture Jennings) -- slight, scrappy, willing to do anything he can to get on base and make things happen. Yet, in 7,471 plate appearances, Castillo was hit just twelve times -- 0.16% of his plate appearances. Biggio was hit over sixteen times as often as Castillo, Jennings nearly thirty-two times as often. It's not that hard to see why if you look at a video; Castillo generally stood straight up and down, and well back in the box, so that he can reach out and slap at even inside pitches. He's also moving all the time in the box, which probably makes him a bit more ready to get out of the way.

Taking one for the team can actually be a highly valuable skill. Biggio is a great player either way, and Jennings is at least a good one, but how about Ron Hunt? His on-base percentage in non-HBP plate appearances was .334; with the HBPs, .368. He had no other skills.

Nonetheless. Who were the best players at avoiding HBPs, or the worst at drawing them? I'm not aware of any site that carries HBP% or something similar, so I've had to piece it together through various Play Index searches, but here's by best shot at a "top" ten at avoiding getting hit, since 1901. It's largely subjective; there are a bunch of guys who batted three to five thousand times and were hit once or twice, but I'm choosing to ignore them because they're not as interesting to me as someone with a much longer career who was almost never hit. Then again, if you lasted three thousand or so PAs and were never hit, that's pretty interesting. If you want to be more objective about it, here's a list of fewest career HBPs with a minimum of 5,000 PA.

So here's my own list:

Whatever Happened to Bill James' Predictions for the Hall of Fame?

By Bill

Yesterday, a piece over on the Yankees blog Pinstripe Alley incited a little lively discussion (and some ridicule) on Twitter, when the author, jscape2000, noted Nate Silver's observation that there are historically about 35 players active at any given time who go on to become Hall of Famers, and went on to make some guesses as to who those future Hall of Famers are at this moment.  And while you might argue with some of his picks (particularly picking Yadier Molina to end up in the "Tier One" camp; he's had a pretty decent start to his career and everything, but he's not going to make anybody forget about Bench or Piazza), I think the idea is a perfectly good one.

It reminded me, however, that in his 1995 book Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? (previously published in '94 under the alternative, more provocative title The Politics of Glory), the great Bill James had made a similar set of projections and predictions, using his Hall of Fame Monitor tool and some educated guesswork to project the BBWAA Hall of Fame inductees for the next 25 years, covering 1995 through 2019.

That's necessarily an inexact science -- I remembered in particular that Ruben Sierra was on the list -- but I wondered how the rest of it came out.  And it turns out that not only did I still have the book, permitting me to see it for myself, but through the magic of the internet, I can show you!  I thought I'd take a look at each year's picks and see how he did.  The number in parentheses is that player's year on the ballot that the predicted year would have represented:

1995: Mike Schmidt (1), Jim Rice (1)
There's a fun one right off the bat.  Schmidt sailed in with 97% of the vote, while Jim Ed garnered less than 30% and, as we all know, had a long, tough fight ahead.  James has quite famously battled against the dramatic overstatements of Rice's case, comparing him to Yankee contemporary Roy White (who got zero votes in 1985), but clearly didn't trust the writers to see it his way.  It's also appropriate that these two show up together given Schmidt's recent comments; whatever the other failings of the BBWAA, at least they saw the situation more clearly than Schmidt does.