Let’s not get started on what is and isn’t an “at bat.”
Baseball is a funny game.
Walter Johnson did it 4 times. Brett Saberhagen did it twice in less than a month for the Red Sox in 1998. Both were the 4th inning.
I have recorded perhaps history’s only 2 pitch inning, although it was in an amateur league where the other team only fielded 8 players and therefore the 9th spot in their order was an automatic out.
Like a man with 4 balls could walk.
I stand 77 feet tall
I got 8 balls
And all y’all
Are subject to my thrall …
MC Frontalot, Braggadocio
How about a complete nine-inning game with only nine pitches, one per inning? Yes, it’s theoretically possible.
What do you do with an elephant with three balls? Walk him and pitch to the giraffe.
The people in that Yahoo! Answers thread can’t seem to get it through their collective head that if you win a home game in eight and a half innings you PITCH in the top of the ninth.
Be thankful they can count to eight. And understand fractions. 
Also, a ball that is tipped foul, is not a foul tip.
And a batter who is hit by a pitch (not a soccer or cricket pitch, but a pitched ball, which was probably actually a ball rather than a strike) becomes a batsman.
I would say that “hit batsman” (the only context in which the older term for batters is retained, IIRC) describes the event, and the counting stat thus accrued by pitchers (the batters’ corollary being the hit-by-pitch)–not the role of the player. There is no material distinction between a batter and a batsman, the way there is among, say, batters, batter-runners, and baserunners.
You can get a hit and also be out on the same play. An example is if you hit the ball and run past 1st and are thrown out at 2nd. You still get credit for a hit , a single.
I’ve always though that was a terrible decision by the original rulesmakers. If you run yourself into an out you shouldn’t get a hit. (Similarly, if you reach base as the result of an error, you shouldn’t be counted as having made an out that never actually happened.)
I guess you can’t change it now though, or else statistics would all be different.
I guess the idea is that you were safe on first, then subsequently thrown out. Not all that different than getting picked off after a single. Still stupid though.
Yeah, I don’t have a problem with that ruling. You’re not going to take a single away from a guy who gets caught stealing second on the next pitch.
In that case there was at least a chance for the team to improve it’s position. The pitch could have been a balk, or the batter might have hit the ball, or got hit by it, etc. If he’s picked off before a pitch is thrown with no one else on base I can’t see a difference between that and getting put out at second.
ETA: Hmm. Well in the case of getting put out at second at least there was a chance for the defense to screw up, and the pick off could have been a balk. So it is pretty much all the same.
Exactly, end result is the same. You don’t (and shouldn’t) take the single away in any of those cases.
And frankly, if a pitcher was credited a no-hitter when there was a play where a guy gets thrown out trying to stretch a double into a triple…well, that just doesn’t seem right.
I take your point.
For that matter, IF you’re going to deny me a hit because you think the shortstop SHOULD have fielded my chopper cleanly and thrown me out, well, then why don’t you credit me with a hit when the third baseman makes a spectacular diving catch to rob me of what SHOULD have been a double?
Or, conversely, why do we absolve Clayton Kershaw of blame for an “unearned” run scored due to an error by the second baseman (“It wasn’t Clayton’s fault- that SHOULD have been an easy out”) when we don’t charge him with runs that SHOULD have scored if Andre Ethier hadn’t made a circus catch?
Because the burden is on the offense to hit and score safely–to surpass or evade the defenders. Harry Wright saw it as a quasi ‘moral’ reckoning.
Remember that the original assumption was that almost all balls would be put in play; the role of the pitcher was much less vital to the side in the field. The “earning” of runs is all about judgment of batter-runners and baserunners against fielders. The penalty, or absolution, of a pitcher, is incidental (after all, runs can be unearned because of pitchers’ own errors).