I played baseball for 9-10 years of my life, and was an amateur umpire for 3 years, so baseball’s not a foreign concept to me at all. However, this question has always bugged me.
Going back to the 7-9 year old age group, pitchers were far and away the best hitters on most teams. At that point, I can chalk it up that they were usually the most coordinated kids in the age group. If you could get the mechanics of pitching down, you were probably quick enough to hit a fastball coming down the plate at 30-35 miles per hour.
In the 10-12 age group, the pitchers tended to be the biggest guys on the team (since they could throw the hardest). The pitchers were still one of the most dominant hitters on most teams, but first/third basemen and catchers were starting to catch up.
Then in the 13-16 age group, pitchers were not quite as dominant at the plate as the other two age groups. First basemen, third basemen, catchers, and 1 or 2 outfielders had morphed into power hitters.
I quit playing at 17, but in most cases the pitchers were still DECENT hitters on most teams. Skip ahead a couple years to minor/major leagues, and the pitchers are usually lucky if they are hitting .120 or so. With maybe 1-2 doubles the entire year.
So what happens to make this so? Is it just that the pitchers wind up spending so much time working on their pitching, and not enough time on batting practice?
You keep seperating out the best and moving them to the next level. For every ten thousand kids who played sandlot baseball in school, only about one is going to make the pros. By the time you get to the major leagues, you’re looking at best .01%. And the chances that one person is going to be in the top .01% both for hitting and for pitching is almost non-existent.
In the younger years the early maturers are pitching because they’re physically farther along than their teammates. As they go higher into competition, the others start catching up and more time is needed to focus on pitching.
Also, how many kids who pitch at age 7 are still pitchers at 17? Maybe they’ve moved to other positions that it turned out they’re better suited for.
I seem to recall several MLB position players that have been mentioned as pitchers in Little League.
Another factor is as you climb through the ranks, hitting prowess is less and less a factor in choosing one pitcher over another.
ETA: The athletes who make it even into the low minors are phenomenal talents at baseball and could hit high school/college pitching, When facing pitching at the pro level, they finally meet their match.
This is the part the has me the most confused. Once you graduated from the 10-12 age group, and went from facing 12 year old pitchers to facing 15-16 year old pitchers, the change was HUGE. The 15-16 year olds had no problem throwing breaking balls, screwballs, knuckle balls, sliders and the like; and they could also throw 80+'ish mph. In the previous age group you pretty much got either a fast ball of about 60 mph or a curve ball coming in at 45-50 mph.
You would think that the pitchers would be the best at spotting the more complex pitches, since they throw them all the time themselves. That should give them an advantage over the average hitter.
I appreciate the earlier answers and acknowledge that they definitely have some merit (moving a hard throwing pitcher/hitter to third base/outfield, weeding the pitchers down to the point hitting doesn’t matter, finally being outpitched by the other great pitchers). It still seems like they should have a little bit of an edge over the other players.
ETA: I was never a pitcher, just 2nd baseman. I was leadoff/speedy (Small,quick) kinda guy
Pitchers are lucky enough to be born with great arms. That does not make them great athletes. Big league hitting is an act that few people who concentrate on just that can do. To expect a pitcher to hit is asking a lot.
The best hitters are obsessive about it. True, they have loads of natural talent, but no one hits successfully at the major leagues without significant work and practice. Most top hitters have batting cages in their houses and work all off season on it. Pitchers, of course, are not paid to hit, so they work on their pitching in the off season. They’re not going to work on hitting too, since there’s no incentive, plus an injury would derail their pitching development.
They also don’t get the at bats during the season that a position player does. A pitcher will get about a fifth as many at bats (if even that many) as an every day player. American league pitchers don’t even get that. This is true during the minors as well, so they never learn to hit professional level pitching at any level.
Perspective. Just because you can throw a 93 MPH fastball followed up with an 81 MPH changeup doesn’t mean you can hit that changeup, nor does it mean you can expect it or recognize it (okay - most players can recognize a changeup, they just do so about a half-second after they swing!).
There’s a reason Ted Williams spent his time in the batting cage and not trying to learn how to pitch to improve his hitting game.
Pitcher’s hitting ability is simply not selected for. That is, even if you are an absolute zero at the plate as a hitter, you’ll still get the big contract. Even if you are a good hitter (c.f. Ken Brett) at some point if you show you can’t pitch anymore, you’ll be released.
[Or transition to a hitter’s position.] Look at Rick Ankiel-while a pitcher he could certainly hit some, his K-W was 6-26. As a hitter, he’s improved that to a 1-2.75 ratio, and improved his other stats (tho this year he’s hit like he did as a pitcher).
By the time a pitcher gets to the majors, he probably has not batted since he was in his early teens. With the DH in every level but the National League, you’ve never faced an 80 mph fast ball, let alone one coming in at 95. Plus there’s no reason these days for a good pitcher to learn how to bat. Better to spend the time working on his pitches, than for something he’s unlikely to be called upon to do (only starting pitchers in the NL get any at bats – relievers are usually pulled for a pinch hitter – Billy Wager – playing solely in the National League – has a total of 21 plate appearances in over 700 games).
This talk about Rick Ankiel make me go back and look at his baseball-reference page. It always makes me sad to see just how dominant he was in 2000 before it all fell apart. As a rookie he was 7th in the league in strikeouts, 2nd in K/9, and 2nd in WHIP. That’s just ridiculous… How great could he have been?
As far as the OP’s questions its pretty much what everyone else is saying - the odds of being a major-league caliber pitcher and hitter is so low that only a handful of people have ever done it. Since minor-league pitcher’s have no significant incentive to work on their hitting it basically stops developing at the Low-A level.
Obviously both causes discussed here play a part, but I would tend to stress the lack of training and practice. It’s not all that uncommon for players to get to the minor leagues as both hitting and pitching prospects, to the extent that no one is sure which they’ll eventually become. Before long, however, their orginizations *always *pick one or the other, never both. Apparently, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to train a guy up to major-league caliber in both hitting and pitching.
I’ll respectfully disagree. Training and practice would explain why some pitchers bat .070 instead of, say, .130, but for the most part they suck at hitting because they were never good hitters to begin with.
Major league pitchers are bad hitters for more or less the same reason they’re also not very good NFL quarterbacks, NBA point guards or NHL left wingers; there’s no reason why they would be. Major league pitching is, for all practical purposes, a completely different sport from being a position player. You would no more expect a major league pitcher to be a major-league-quality hitter than you would expect him to be a pro-level tennis player. The skill set is such that you cannot afford to sacrifice pitching quality for any other baseball skill. For one thing, selecting pitchers automatically eliminates anyone who can’t get a ball up to at least 82-85 MPH, which (believe it or not) most major league hitters can’t do.
Even fielding their position is generally not an important selection criteria (although they do work on it); Randy Johnson, who is certainly a great pitcher, is a substantially more inept fielder than some people on my slo-pitch team, probably including myself. Pitcher fielding percentages are very low, not because the position is hard but because they’re generally poor fielders.
If pitchers dedicated a lot of time to hitting they’d probably hit a little better as a group but the gains would not be substantial. A .125 hitter does not bat .250 by working harder. It’d be a minimal gain, not enough to really have a lot of impact, and would distract pitchers from what they need to work on; pitching.
With all due respect that is in fact extremely unusual. Almost all amateur players, when they are drafted (or signed as minor league free agents in the case of Latin American players) are either position players or pitchers and not both. Players who have a chance of being either are rare.
I am old. I remember before the DH in the American League . I would be laying in bed listening to the Tiger games and every trip through the lineup there was a dead spot. Not just the inept pitcher but those leading up to him were treated differently. The 8th batter got nothing to hit. Why should he when a dead space was going to follow him. Even the 7th was getting less opportunities. If the pitcher got on base he was a lousy base runner and the leadoff spot was diminished. I was very happy when the league came up with the DH.
Pitchers are bad hitters and I like platooning them. Perhaps we should have an offensive and defensive team. Think how great the defensive game would be if weak hitters but great fielders could do what they do best.
The lack of NFL-style specialization is what makes baseball wonderful. You want hulking sluggers in the 3-4-5 spots in the lineup? Fine. Now where are you gonna play them? The DH breaks this a little bit, and going farther would ruin the game, IMO.
I understand what you’re saying but I’m just not sure I can agree with “never good hitters to begin with”. As the OP says at the amateur levels most pitchers can hit nearly as well as the position players. And there’s always at least one player drafted in the first round every year that could go either way. Hell, the Cardinals have two guys on their current major-league roster that have done both at at least the minor league level (the aforementioned Ankiel and relief pitcher Jason Motte who was a catcher initially).
Well, sure, and most pitchers won’t get drafted by the major leagues. If you go down far enough you’ll find that the big kid who pitches and is the best hitter is also the star center on his school basketball team, the quarterback, the school’s shot put champion, so on and so forth. Kid sports will usually be dominated by bigger, coordinated kids across multiple sports; it’s unusual to find a kid who REALLY excels in one sport to the exclusion of others. Wayne Gretzky was the best player in Brantford at every kids sport he tried.
But as players progress, the divisions between capable and incapable that separate those who will move on from those who will not begin to appear. Inevitably, some kids who prove they can pitch in the high levels of baseball will also be able to hit; there will always be Carlos Zambranos. But for the most part that’s just random chance; the great, great majority of major league pitchers do not and never had the skill to be major league hitters, and vice versa.
With due respect, I don’t believe there’s “at least one player” in the first round every year with even a slight chance of making it in both disciplines, though I am willing to be proven wrong. Ankiel and Motte are rare exceptions indeed, and it’s worth noting Motte was a total failure as a hitter; his career average in the low minors was .191 with no power or patience, which means he’s not really any better a hitter than many major league pitchers. Motte didn’t have a ghost of a chance of making the majors as a position player.
