I don’t think you could name very many guys who remained regulars at shortstop batting under .200. I can’t think of anyone. Ray Oyler didn’t hold onto a job.
The man himself, the gold standard for terrible hitting infielders, Mario Mendoza, had a career average of .215 in 9 seasons.
Dal Maxvill, in the WS two years in a row. But the point is, even pitchers can hit fairly closed to .200, anybody whose body is still warm can get a hit every once in a while, and a .200 hitter, literally, cannot hit at all, except by pure luck. Nobody is a good enough fielder to make up for that shortfall at the plate.
Dal Maxvill hit under .200 in a full season only once, though, and that was after he’d been in the World Series. He was a career .217 hitter.
I think you’re rather understating the difficulty of batting .200; batting .200 is absolutely not done by luck. A player who can hit .200 in a representative sample of at bats has a extremely advanced level of hitting skill as compared to all players in organized baseball; the skill needed to be a consistent .200 hitter in the major leagues is rare. Dal Maxvill or Mario Mendoza were, as kids, the best hitters on their teams, by a mile. Maxvill batted .348 in AA ball in 1962, a total impossibility for an unskilled hitter.
A luck batting average in MLB - that is, the batting average a healthy adult male who is not a professional baseball player but who has played enough baseball to understand how to swing a bat - would probably be .075 or so. I would be pretty impressed with an amateur who could hit .150. Just standing in the box against a major league pitcher would be a frightening experience; the speed of MLB pitching is unimaginably fast, much faster than most people have ever seen a ball thrown close to them.
So much this. I was a damn good HS baseball player, better than average glove, and hit .482 for the three years I played. Got to the next level with a full ride scholarship at a Division I college program. Better competition, and my average fell to .265. In my last year, we played Vanderbilt. I can’t recall the guy’s name now, but their starting pitcher was a projected first round pick. He threw in the mid-90s, and had a really good slider, and a change. Holy shit. I never even came close to fouling one off.
Hitting .200 at the major league level is no joke. Your average guy off the street can’t do it.
I doubt your average guy off the street could foul off a pitch. Go to a batting cage sometime with mechanical pitcher and set it at the highest level. I doubt you could get a bat on the ball. I know I can’t touch the setting labeled double-A and I believe it only throws fast balls with little movement.
Oh, I’ve done that. The absolute upper limit on a ball I could actually make contact with was about 80 MPH. Like leftifield6, I was a very good ballplayer in my youth. Above 85 I might have well have been swinging with my eyes closed.
80, in the major leagues, is a slow changeup. There are pitchers who literally never throw that slowly.
When I was 27 years old, a big guy in good shape, if you’d given me an entire season’s worth of at bats in the major leagues, and I got all of the previous winter and spring training to work with the best hitting coach in the world, there is no way in hell I’d have hit .200.
I had a good eye and good timing once upon a time. I’ve been pitched to by college guys who were up in the 80s at least, and I fouled a couple of their good pitches. And that’s it, possibly nothing but luck. With practice I’m sure I could have done better, fouling off a few more pitches and maybe even a hit by luck. Hitting MLB pitching comes from making a career of baseball combined with extraordinary skills.
Mike Piazza. I don’t recall anyone saying he was a great catcher. He was better than a lot of people gave him credit for, but was by no means great. His value was, primarily, as a hitter.
Be glad Steven Drew never cashed any of your team’s paychecks… 
No, but there are many with long careers that had lifetime BAs below .240. Ron Hansen, and Hal Lanier, for instance.
Bud Harrelson has been considered the Mets greatest shortstop (until Reyes came along), and his lifetime BA is .236 with a grand total of seven home runs in 16 years, yet he started for the team for a dozen years.
And once you consider backup shortstops, you can find many who did worse.
Hitting definitely isn’t everything.
Baseball aficionados will be familiar with the Mendoza Line. It’s generally “thought of as the offensive threshold below which a player’s presence in Major League Baseball cannot be justified, regardless of his defensive abilities.”
That is, a .200 batting average. Its name comes from Mario Medoza, who held way more value for his defense than his offense.
So yes, there obviously is a point where even the best defender can’t save enough runs if he’s not hitting well enough and producing on offense. But you can be a crappy hitter, have crappy OBP, and no power at all, but still be a defensive stalwart and play everyday in the field.
Some guys today that immediately come to mind are Andrelton Simmons, José Iglesias, and Kevin Kiermaier.
Andrelton Simmons - lifetime .261 hitter
Jose Iglesias - lifetime .273 hitter
Kevin Kiermaier - lifetime .259 hitter
None of those come anywhere near proving your point.
Jackie Bradley Jr was expected to be a light hitting outfielder with a fantastic glove. His first real season in the big leagues he hit .198 and people generally agreed that wasn’t enough to support him playing everyday. The talk around Boston was if he could bat .240 he would justify his playing.
This year he’s hitting .274 with some pretty good power numbers and his glove and arm are still great.
It would be interesting to know who the guy was. Odds are pretty good that he topped out at AA, or maybe pitched 10 major league innings with a 7-ish ERA.
On the subject of hitting in general, Dean Chance was the worst hitter ever to amass a full season’s worth of major-league at-bats; his .066 batting average (he was a pitcher, obviously) is a reasonable guess as to what an average 20-something in good shape with lots of time to practice would be able to do.
I’ve seen estimates that fielding is about 15% of the game (pitching is about 40% and hitting around 45%). So it should be no surprise that the skill that is three times more important is the one that teams place emphasis on. Which is not to say that all glove/no hit wizards can’t or don’t exist, but they are rare and that is assuming they can hit at a passable level (i.e. BA over .200, OBA over .250).
Shouldn’t pitching + fielding have to = batting + baserunning? Preventing a run is as good as scoring one.
Found him. I went into the Baseball Reference website and searched by Vanderbilt and the year my team played them. You are spot on, he topped out at AA after being drafted in the 2nd round by the Brewers. Mark Ambrose
Looks like he had a 2.97 ERA at the single A level, but that ballooned to 6.11 at AA.
Played 6 seasons in the minors, good for him. I was impressed by his stuff, that is for sure.
Fielding is more important in some positions that others. That’s why a team is more willing to put up with a poor hitter at shortstop or catcher than at first base. But a team wants to get some offense even at the important defensive positions. Even the best defensive shortstop won’t save enough runs with his glove to make up for hitting .200 with few walks and no power. RickJay proved that with his analysis of Ozzie Smith.
Tell that to the Blue Jays. :smack: