I live in an American League market so don’t often get to see pitchers hit. Over the last while, there’s a been a lot of inter-league play and this got me wondering …
Has an NL pitcher ever batted in anything other than the #9 position on a regular basis?
Thanks
The only one that comes to mind immediately is the Babe, though Cy Young himself was a good hitter. Not sure where Cy was in the batting order, though.
Wait, the Bambino was a Yankee and you asked for NL.
It’s often said among sabermetricians that the optimal lineup construction for the Giants, given Barry Bonds’s unbelieveable ability, would be to bat Bonds second (maximizing the number of plate appearances he gets) and to bat the pitcher eighth (so that Bonds has more of a chance in later innings of getting up with men on base).
I’d love to see them try it.
Also, Tony LaRussa experimented with having the pitcher bat eighth a couple of years ago.
I don’t have evidence to substantiate this, but I seem to recall reading that there were a few pitchers prior to about 1935 who were passably good hitters, and that they were sometimes batted ahead of a poor-hitting catcher or shortstop, in seventh or eighth position. Hopefully a Doper with a stronger interest in baseball history can substantiate or refute that.
I am old enough to have seen good hiting pitchers placed 7th or 8th in the lineup, and a poor hitting shortstop batting 9th.
Does anyone here actually think Babe Ruth or Walter Johnson batted 9th?
I dont like baseball anymore now that the pitichers do not get to hit the ball. It was always extra exciting to see Warren Spahn, or another good hitting pitcher, hit a homer to win a game for himself. It was also funny to see a pitcher who could not bat .050 make a fool of himself.
You dont have to go back that far to find good hitting pitchers.
I also have seen pitchers play first base, third base, substituted as base runners, and I have even seen an outfielder pitch(Rocky Colovito), esp in long games when managers started running out of players. I have also seen “player managers”, where the manager got up there and either pinched hit/or played in the game.
But they do! Well…half of 'em do, anyway. And Steve Avery, pitcher for the (American League) Detroit Tigers, had a pinch-hit single and scored the go-ahead run just last Wednesday.
During the 1998 season, Tony LaRussa of the St. Louis Cardinals had his pitchers bat eighth for almost every game of the entire second half of the season. So for that length of time, one might say that all of his starting pitchers were batting #8 on a “regular basis”. Before that, the last occasion when any pitcher batted higher than #9 even once occurred when Steve Carlton of the Phillies batted #8 on June 1, 1979–ahead of light-hitting shortstop Bud Harrelson.
Carlton only did it once, however, and the St. Louis pitchers were batting eighth because they were weak, not because they were strong–LaRussa wanted to get more men on base for #3 hitter Mark McGwire. What about a pitcher who regularly batted higher because he was good?
I don’t know. I’ve heard tell that Don Drysdale “often” batted seventh or eighth in the 1960’s. But the records at Project Retrosheet only go back to the late 1960’s, so I can’t verify that. Most managers don’t like to tinker with their lineup just because a particular pitcher is on the hill, so even a good-hitting pitcher will often bat ninth just to maintain continuity. In addition, batting another player below the pitcher can seem like an insult and a lot of managers don’t want to do that in return for the very marginal benefit.
As far as Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson go, during their World Series appearances (as pitchers, not counting Ruth as an OF) they also batted 9th with one exception. Babe Ruth batted 6th in the fourth game of the 1918 World Series. This is the only time in 100 years that a starting pitcher has not batted 9th in the Series.
Terrific! Thanks!