In Major League Baseball they will list a players batting average.
My question is, is every major league baseball player capable of hitting a home run if they get the right pitch?
Yes.
You don’t even need to be a major league baseball player.
Sure. Even pitchers (in the National League, anyway) hit home runs.
Depends. Batting is a skill and batting against major league pitching is incredibly hard.
I’d bet that given the chance more than a few pitchers who don’t bat couldn’t do it against a good pitcher when he’s on his game.
That being said, if you were to just lob the ball over the plate the odds go up drastically. Most males in good shape and who’ve played at least enough baseball to know how to take a good cut could probably do it under those conditions given enough pitches.
Moving this OP to the Game Room from General Questions.
samclem, moderator
Nah. Most great pitchers were the best athletes on their team in high school. When they weren’t pitching they were playing shortstop or center field. Even if they’re veteran American Leaguers who hit once or twice a year, they still have the coordination and power to hit one out. Even Justin Verlander throws one over the plate now and again.
Judging by his performance last year, he’s throwing hittable balls more often than he used to.
With very few exceptions. Eddie Gaedel (the famous midget) would certainly have been unable to hit a ballout of the park, even with a fungo bat standing on second base. Pete Gray, who had only one arm, hit several doubles, but a homer would have been very unlikely with only one arm. He pl;ayed during WWII, whtn two-armed players were all in the war. Jim Abbott, in recent times, was a one-armed pitcher, who never needed to bat because of the DH ule in the AL. But he ended his career with a one-year stint in the NL, and got twohits, both of Cubs pitcher John Lieber in different games. But he never hit anything anywhere near home run distances.
A home run is defined by the rules as over 250 feet, and it was possible to hit 257-tfoot home runs when the Giants played in New York’s Polo Grounds. 250 feet is not really very far, and most high school players can do it, but hitting major league pitching is something else entirely. And nearly all proper ball parks now have shortest distances at around 300.
There have been a few notoriously bad-hitting pitchers (Sandy Koufax, for example) who succeeded twice in homering, in 858 plate appearances. Under controlled circumstances, Koufax would certainly have been able to hit a ball the requisite distance, but incompetent hitters are very intimidated at the plate, and are afraid to stand near a pitch that is coming at nearly 100 mph, because their first priority is to be able to dive out of the way of a wild pitch, which is in flight for less than a half a second.
Some players have failed to demonstrate that ability in extended careers, however. While it is possible that they might be able to hit a home run by some lucky fluke, that would seem to more of an accident than the ability to hit even a bad pitch (which they must have received at least occasionally) over the fence.
The Non-Homerun Hitters (Note: This article is undated but seems to have been written in the early 1980s.)
Colibri’s post reminds me of one of my favorite trivia questions:
What Hall of Famer hit a home run in his first major league at-bat, but never hit another in his 20 year long career?
Knuckleballer/reliever Hoy Wilhelm
Rafael Belliard hit only 2 HR in a 17 year career.
Gad, those stats were painful to look at. OPS of .530 and he managed to collect 0.1 WAR over his career. He must have been a terrific fielder.
FTR, Jim Abbott had two arms but only one hand.
According to Jim Abbott’s wikipedia page, it’s claimed by Mariano Rivera that he hit home runs during batting practice.
OTOH, there’s a difference between batting practice vs. hitting in a game. Not so much in the quality of the pitch, because we’re assuming the “right pitch” but in your batting strategy. I’d hazard a guess that every major league player is physically able to hit a ball hard enough to get a HR. Some players may never try to hit a ball that hard during a game, because it isn’t part of their batting strategy.
There’s not a doubt in mind mind every single hitter who plays Major League baseball can hit a home run with the right pitch. I, a 43-year-old doofus, can hit a home run out of an MLB ballpark if you feed me the right pitch. If you had asked Rafael Belliard to try to hit home runs in batting practice and had just fed him a succession of meatballs, he would have knocked plenty of them out of the park.
Of course, the “right pitch” for me is a 73-MPH straight meatball no pitcher would deliberately throw at any level above high school ball. The whole thing with pro ball is the pitcher never throws you the “right pitch.” It is a succession of pitches that range mostly from “unhittable” to “sort of hittable” with the odd hittable pitch. The measure of success for a hitter is their ability to wait for, identify, and hammer the odd hittable pitch.
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/downloads/y2014/official_baseball_rules.pdf (492k PDF) has the MLB Official Baseball Rules. In (major league) baseball a batter-runner hits a home run by hitting a fair ball, then touching all bases and scoring on the same hit (home run defined in rule 10.06 (a)), if there is no error, dead ball, etc., on the play. So the hit ball can remain completely inside the park. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside-the-park_home_run has a handy list of MLB inside-the-park home runs. Rule 6.09 (h) may be where the “250 feet” comes from: “However, should such a fair fly be deflected at a point less than 250 feet from home plate, the batter shall be entitled to two bases only.”
At age 29, Pete Gray hit 5 home runs in the minors the year before he played in the majors. Lefthanded pitcher Jim Abbott (2 arms, only 1 hand, as Blank Slate noted) hit 7 home runs his senior year in high school: “He was able to generate remarkable power, blasting seven homers and batting an excellent .427 as a senior.” per Rick Swaine’s SABR article.
Other players have similarly gotten themselves in the record book. See for example Major League Baseball’s 14 Most Bizarre Records You’ve Never Heard of, Eric Brach’s 2012 article.
Oh, MANY players have hit a homer in their first at-bats, and several of them never hit another. But Hoyt Wilhelm is the only future Hall of Famer among them.