Discussed: Carlos Zambrano, run expectancy, double play scenarios, playing it cool, Angel Hernandez, creeping determinism
Baseball pitchers taking at-bats in Major League Baseball’s National League is off the top of my head the single example in popular professional sports whereby you are witnessing a participant be legitimately terrible at the sport they are paid to play. Philosophical spirit-of-the-game arguments aside, some may argue that there are a handful of pitchers who are at least passable hitters. However, for pitchers with at least 200 plate appearances since 2009, Carlos Zambrano is the best with a wRC+ of 65, 35% worse than your average Major League hitter. Of the 101 pitchers who qualify under that criteria only 36 have wRC+s greater than or equal to zero. Somehow managing to be a mathematically confounding greater than 100% worse than your average hitter are the remaining 65. Pitchers are very bad hitters, it cannot be overstated.
This brings us to the game played on May 17, 2019 between the Colorado Rockies and the Philadelphia Phillies. In the top of the second inning the Phillies managed to fielders-choice-and-error their way to allowing the bases loaded with one out. A team in this situation on average would expect to score about 1.5 runs before the inning is over. Unfortunately for the Rockies this wasn’t an average situation because the hitter stepping to the plate was Jon Gray who, since he is a pitcher, is terrible at hitting by definition.
Jon has a career batting average of 0.091. Put another way, he makes an out 91% of the time he tries his best to get a hit. The situation was not as good in reality as it might seem on paper for the Rockies.
Making matters worse, with the bases loaded there are multiple opportunities in which an inning-ending double play can be manufactured if Jon happened to put the ball in play. Home-to-first, second-to-first, third-to-second, third-to-first, that’s four right there and there has to be at least like several more but I don’t want to think about all of them but most of them happen because of a ground ball.
When bad-at-hitting-through-no-fault-of-his-own Jon Gray does manage to put the ball in play he hits it on the ground two out of every three times.
To round out the situation, it was Charlie Blackmon’s turn to hit next after Jon Gray. Even taking into account the universally difficult matchup for left-handed hitting hitters versus left-handed pitching pitchers such as the current at the time pitcher Cole Irvin, Charlie has a career batting average of 0.299. His chances of not making an out are about three times better than Jon’s. This is not even bearing in mind his ability to get hits for more than one base which tend to allow more runs to score than just single base hits, especially when there is a runner at every base.
Summarizing the facts: the Rockies had their hitter most likely to make an out hitting in the situation they were most likely to score runs should a hit be produced. Furthermore, a ball hit on the ground will most likely end the inning and any chance of scoring runs, not to mention one of the team’s best hitters was next to hit.
This brings us to the question at hand: why was Jon Gray even allowed to swing the bat?
Rockies manager Buddy Black should have politely instructed Jon to under no circumstances make any move whatsoever with his bat. But also don’t make it obvious that he has no intention of moving the bat, do not be too casual with his general demeanor up there. The Phillies must remain convinced that the Rockies would be so stupid to allow pitcher Jon Gray to freely swing at any pitch he deemed hittable. Opposing pitcher Cole Irvin should not feel total license to throw fastballs down the middle without fear of reprisal from even such a terrible hitter. For some reason Major League pitchers tend to treat other pitchers with the same competitive respect as non-pitchers when they are hitting, maybe due to the fact they they themselves wish they were respected hitters when they hit. Either way, it’s better for Jon to act totally normal and play the whole thing super cool, but not too super cool.
The worst case scenario of not swinging is Jon strikes out on three called strikes and registers only a single out allowing good-at-hitting Charlie Blackmon to try his hand with the bases loaded. This hypothetical situation—two outs and three men on base—will produce about 0.75 runs on average prior to the end of the inning. Not as many as with one out, but still more than with three outs.
The best case scenario of not swinging is a passed ball, wild pitch, non-injury-resulting hit-by-pitch, or walk, all of which would score a run. This was not totally out of question since the basically-makes-it-up-as-he-goes Angel Hernandez was calling balls and strikes, so you might get something to wobble your way from sheer incompetence umpire-wise. Plus since Jon has (hypothetically) been instructed to play it cool up there pitcher Cole Irvin will not (hypothetically, maybe) be throwing it right down the middle for strikes. He’ll still be trying to make an out while not offering potentially hit-producing pitches i.e. obvious strikes.
In the end, Jon Gray was allowed to swing the bat, hitting into an inning-ending double play, leaving Charlie Blackmon to lead off the following inning with a (goddammit!) double. Eventually the Rockies would lose the entire game by a single run giving hindsight’s biased punch extra hutzpah.