Derek Dietrich: All-Time Leader
Many of you are home, or traveling home, for the Thanksgiving holiday. Not only aren’t you in the mood to read about baseball — I bet you’re especially not in the mood to read about Derek Dietrich, who the Marlins designated for assignment on Tuesday. I’m not really in the mood to linger on Derek Dietrich, myself, which is why I’m going to do this fast. Won’t waste your time. I’ll get to the point and leave you alone.
Dietrich is a useful player. He’s 29 years old, and he has a career wRC+ of 109. He can play a lot of positions, albeit none of them all that well. Hidden in the numbers, however, is that Dietrich has a specialty. Now, whenever anyone talks about players getting hit by a lot of pitches, the name that ought to come to mind is Brandon Guyer. We’ve written about Guyer at FanGraphs before, and indeed, if you set a low enough minimum, Guyer is easily the all-time leader in HBP rate. But Guyer has 1,487 big-league plate appearances. What if you set the minimum at, say, 1,500?
Given that cutoff, here are the highest career HBP rates since the turn of the last century:
| Player | PA | HBP | HBP% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Derek Dietrich | 2132 | 93 | 4.36% |
| F.P. Santangelo | 2075 | 83 | 4.00% |
| Ron Hunt | 6158 | 243 | 3.95% |
| Carlos Quentin | 3247 | 127 | 3.91% |
| Craig Wilson | 2311 | 90 | 3.89% |
| Jason LaRue | 3103 | 107 | 3.45% |
| Reed Johnson | 3992 | 134 | 3.36% |
| Fernando Vina | 4742 | 157 | 3.31% |
| Bert Daniels | 2236 | 72 | 3.22% |
| Dan McGann | 4648 | 149 | 3.21% |
Dietrich has a lower rate than Guyer, but he’s also played a lot more than Guyer. Dietrich’s the all-time leader with a 1,500 PA cutoff. He’s the all-time leader with a 2,000 PA cutoff. Yes, it’s true that Guyer is more anomalous, but Dietrich is anomalous as well. As these things go, that’s a pretty healthy lead Dietrich has over second place.
Dietrich’s the all-time leader, maybe with a minimum-related asterisk, but all rate-stat leaderboards come with some kind of minimum, and they’re always arbitrary. So I want to give Dietrich his moment in the sun, in what’s otherwise probably a pretty crappy week for him. Dietrich has been hit by 93 pitches. He’s been hit by 13 pitches in an 0-and-2 count. He’s been hit by 39 pitches with the pitcher ahead. He’s been hit by seven pitches by Tanner Roark.
Courtesy of Baseball Savant, here are all the pitches that hit Dietrich somewhere, or were at least judged to have done so:
Here’s that weird low one over the plate:
Here’s one close to the strike zone:
Here’s another one close to the strike zone:
Here’s one I just think is kind of quirky:
Here’s the one time he’s been hit with the bases loaded:
Here’s the one worth the most positive win probability added:
And here’s the one that happened in the lowest-leverage situation:
At least in terms of WPA, Dietrich’s career hit-by-pitches have been worth almost a combined three wins. Dietrich has been hit by 93 pitches while drawing just 144 walks — a dozen of which have been intentional. Dietrich hasn’t exactly built a career around getting hit by the baseball, but getting hit by the baseball has given his career a jolt, and it’s a career that’s going to continue, despite all of the aches and pains. Every year, Derek Dietrich feels a lot of pain in his legs and his elbow. And, every year, for pitchers facing Derek Dietrich, he is a pain in the ass.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
So, how long till he gets signed by the Indians then to replace Guyer? They need outfielders.
He’s a Cleveland native; that actually sounds like a good fit.
Who else thinks he stuck his foot out on purpose in that first gif as he saw the pitch coming in?
Some of these highlight how utterly ridiculous some HBP’s can be. Crowding the plate and making zero effort to evade a pitch, are still far too prevelant. Ump’s need to get on it.
Read something two weeks ago about how the Marlins were concerned they had no left-handed hitters aside from Derek Dietrich. Granted, his arb salary wasn’t really worth it for a guy who struggled in the field, but I don’t exactly know how they’re planning to replace him for anything less than that.
They have various controllable infielders and outfielders who have more upside and are ready for regular MLB playing time/will be ready by May or June. A contending team under the same circumstances retains Dietrich, but he’s expendable in a rebuilding year.
Wrong again, Jeff. We’re always in the mood to read about baseball.
This. Actually the holiday season is when I most enjoy reading about baseball, while my parents watch my kids.
Getting HBP seven times by Tanner Roark? That’s just ridiculous.
That’s insane. I wonder what the record is for most HBP issued to a single batter from the same pitcher.
I can’t definitively answer your question, but I think it’s very likely a record in the modern era.
I just looked at some of the all time leaders in HBP since they began recording the stat systematically in 1955, and you have a lot of familiar faces:
Randy Johnson (190)
Tim Wakefield (186)
Charlie Hough (174)
Jim Bunning (160)
Roger Clemens (159)
Nolan Ryan (158)
Clemens, for example, didn’t hit any single batter more than 3 times. Randy Johnson: 4. Incredibly both Nolan Ryan and Jim Bunning hit Ron Hunt more than any other player, both 5 times (Ryan did it only 25 PA too!), and Tim Wakefield beaned Shannon Stewart 6 times.
Charlie Hough ties Roark/Dietrich’s distinction, having hit Don Baylor 7 times too, but no one else I can find exceeds 7 HBPs. It’s a remarkable feat, especially for so few years. All of the above pitchers threw for significantly more innings than Roark, and had so many more opportunities to run the numbers up. 7 HBP in 31 PA is ridiculous. That’s a 22.6% HBP rate!
This piqued my interest, so I looked at a few more leaders:
Burt Blyleven (155)
Jamey Wright (155)
Don Drysdale (154)
Jamey Moyer (146)
AJ Burnett (143)
Pedro Martinez (141)
Kevin Brown (139)
Chan Ho Park (138)
Only Wright gets close, hitting Jason Kendall 6 times.
Roark isn’t anywhere close to these sorts of HBP numbers. He’s hit 40 batters in his career. 17.5% of all his HBPs have been against Dietrich. The next highest HBP percentage is Hough’s 7 against Baylor, which accounts for 4.0% of his HBP total. Roark may have hit Dietrich 4.4 times more than any other pitcher has hit a batter.
#bringbacknotgraphs
If a batter is hit by a pitch in the strike zone, that’s still supposed to be a strike, right?
Yeah.
“Given that cutoff, here are the highest career HBP rates since the turn of the last millennium” I think you meant the last century.
Doesn’t both “last millennium” and “last century” mean since 2001?
Edit: NM, I misinterpreted “turn of”
I think you meant turn of the last century, not millennium. The last millennium would have been the year 1000.
To be pedantic about it, the first millennium ran from year 1 to 1000, the second from 1001 to 2000, and we are now in the third millennium.
So, strictly speaking, Mr Sullivan’s usage is correct.
It’s a good form of amplification for effect.
I always want to read about baseball, especially short, random, and entertaining stuff like this. I could watch him get plunked all day.
He might object to it, though.
I doubt Tanner Roark is his favorite pitcher.
Over a long enough timeline, that chart will be a perfect silhouette of his batting stance.
In the first video, he moved his foot behind the plate and got hit.
That shouldn’t be allowed.
I’m looking forward to Victor Robles challenging Dietrich’s perch at the top.
Robles has been beaned 95 times in 1862 career minor league plate appearances, a 5.1% rate (including a remarkable 34 times in 2016), well above Dietrich’s rate. And Robles doesn’t show any signs of letting up. In two short stints in the majors, he’s already been plunked 4 times in 93 PA, or 4.3% (ever so slightly behind Dietrich).
Erik Kratz