Is This the Year the Homerless Qualifier Club Reopens?

Nico Hoerner hit a home run on Tuesday. It wasn’t exactly a tape measure shot – the ball left his bat at 97 mph and traveled a projected 364 feet, making it 31 feet shorter and nearly 8 mph softer than the average home run this season – but he certainly got all of it. Plenty of players have hit even softer and shorter homers. It was mostly noticeable because it was Hoerner’s first home run of the season.

Among qualified players, Hoerner ranks in the bottom 10 in hard-hit rate, barrel rate, and both max and 90th-percentile exit velocity. He’s a contact hitter, not a power hitter, and it works just fine. He’s running a 102 wRC+ this season, a mark he’s bettered in each of the last four seasons. Still, he’s hit at least seven home runs in each of the last three seasons, and he was due to get on the board at some point. You can’t say the same for Xavier Edwards.

Over three partial seasons in Miami, the 25-year-old Edwards has hit just one home run in 678 plate appearances. He’s the only qualified player this season with a barrel rate of 0% — that is to say he has not yet hit a barrel over his 291 plate appearances and 216 batted balls. I bring all this up because Hoerner’s home run leaves Edwards as the only player who currently has enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title without a single home run. He’s the only player on pace to join an increasingly exclusive fraternity: The Homerless Qualifier Club.

Since 1901, 588 players have made enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title without hitting a single home run. It was once the hottest club in the league, but its members started disappearing right around the time Babe Ruth and his gigantic bat arrived to teach the world about the miraculous new invention known as swinging hard. Membership ticked up again very slightly in the go-go 80s, but in the chart above, the addition of expansion teams makes that revival look bigger than it actually was. That’s clear when you look at the number of homerless qualifiers on a per-team or per-qualifier basis.

During the dead ball era, there were times when literally a third of the league’s qualified batters didn’t hit a home run, but ever since, the club has gotten harder and harder to break into. It contains 364 members and 588 qualified seasons, but more than half of those seasons came before the end of World War I. Moreover, nearly 7% of the players who have achieved this distinction changed teams during their qualifying season. In 1901, seven of the 12 members of the club played on multiple teams. In other words, they were playing so badly that their first team gave up on them and another team figured, “Surely, they’re due to run into one at some point,” then turned out to be wrong.

As Russell Carleton noted earlier this week at Baseball Prospectus, contact players are becoming more and more scarce these days, but even in the 1950s, it was just plain difficult to be good enough to merit an everyday role if you weren’t capable of hitting a home run. The last time as many as 5% of qualified players put up a homerless season was 1989. The last team with more than one such player was the 1986 Cardinals. Vince Coleman earned his spot by stealing 107 bases, while Ozzie Smith racked up 4.9 WAR through excellent contact hitting and playing defense like some sort of wizard or something.

Just 10 players have joined the Homerless Qualifiers Club this century, but even over that timeframe, the drop-off has been steep. Only one player has gained entry since 2012, when Ben Revere displayed his legendary gentleness to the baseball through 588 homerless plate appearances. There was a 10-year gap, during which time it would have been completely reasonable to assume the club was fully dead. Then in 2022, Myles Straw took 596 glorious, homerless plate appearances while running a 65 wRC+. He was able to put up 1.4 WAR thanks to an excellent defensive season in center field and because a 65 wRC+ wasn’t necessarily disqualifying on the 2022 Guardians. Straw even managed to fool at least one announcer into thinking, for one fleeting moment, that he might actually put one over the fence.

Straw is the only active member of the Homerless Qualifier Club. I have been waiting to write about the club until we were down to one qualified player with a chance to reopen it, and Hoerner sacrificed himself for the cause on Tuesday. However, now that we’re here, I’m not positive Edwards is our horse. Yes, he plays in a tough park for home runs in Miami. And yes, over his career, just 13.3% of his hard-hit balls have been fly balls. But it only takes one, and he’ll definitely get lots of chances. Last season, he put up 2.2 WAR, the second-highest total on the team, even though he only got into 70 games. This season, with 0.8 WAR and a 98 wRC+, he’s once again one of the better players on the team. He homered last season in just 303 plate appearances, and he’s already hit a ball 109 mph this season.

Yes, it went straight down into the dirt at a launch angle of -21 degrees, but that’s a lot harder than the rest of the players at the bottom of the Statcast leaderboards. It’s a long season and anything can happen. It wouldn’t necessarily be a shock if Edwards were to find his way into the seats even a couple times. But although he’s the only homerless player who’s on pace to qualify right now, three other contenders have a chance to qualify.

I would be surprised if Alex Verdugo were to get there. He’s been hitting terribly, and he’s also been splitting time in left field with Eli White, whose WAR doesn’t have a minus sign in front of it. Moreover, Verdugo has reached double-digit homers in each of the past four seasons and five of the past six. This is a particularly ugly stretch, but like so many players, he’s only going to play enough to qualify if he starts hitting homers.

Santiago Espinal finds himself in a similar situation. He’s extremely close to qualifying right now, but he’s hitting even worse than Verdugo and he’s also started ceding playing time in recent weeks. The Reds have Wild Card ambitions, and if Espinal isn’t contributing, he’s probably going to start sitting a lot more. Either way, that makes him unlikely to qualify for a batting title if he can’t hit one out in Cincinnati.

That brings us to our real pick. With Orlando Arcia in Colorado now, Nick Allen is entrenched at shortstop in Atlanta, and if there’s one thing the Braves love, it’s taking the phrase “everyday player” very literally. Allen is already just 10 plate appearances away from qualifying, and he’s started every game this month. Moreover, although he’s not hitting at all, he grades out as the ninth-best fielder in baseball according to FRV and the 11th best according to DRS. Even if Allen were to find a way to struggle even more – and honestly, what would that even look like? – it’s hard to see where a replacement would come from. At the moment, the Braves don’t have anyone in the minors who looks ready to do anywhere near as good a job as Allen. Barring injury, he seems like a lock to qualify.

As for the other side of the equation, Allen homered home four times in 2023, once in 2024, and once back in March during spring training. However, among players with at least 230 plate appearances, he currently ranks third from the bottom in 90th-percentile EV, max EV, and hard-hit rate. His average exit velocity puts him fifth from the bottom, and he joins Edwards as the only other player without a barrel all season. If somebody’s going to go without a homer all season, Allen’s our horse.

Still, the smarter bet is that no one will join the club at all. It’s only happened once in the last 12 years, and anything from a mild injury to a DFA to a garbage time home run off a position player could derail any of our contenders. Ever since the 1980s, the Homerless Qualifiers Club has been walking the fine line between exclusivity and extinction. With only two legitimate contenders this early in the season, it’ll probably stay dead for another year.