When I think of a guy who gets a lot of infield hits, a short slap hitting speed burner comes to mind. Willy Taveras, Michael Bourn, Carlos Gomez… those are the kinds of players that I think of when I imagine the league leader in infield hits. And those guys are all on the list, but they’re nowhere near the top. In fact, no one’s particularly close to the guy who has racked up 38 infield hits this year, six more than the next best guy and 13 more than the guy after that.
So who is the king of successful worm burning?
Hunter Pence.
Yes, the same Pence with 21 home runs and a career .498 slugging percentage. The same Pence who has laid down exactly one bunt in his two years in the big leagues and had 13 infield hits last season.
Pence has seen his IFH% increase by 150%, going from 7.3% last year to 17.4% this year. That infield hit rate is also the best in the majors, where he’s followed by Jason Bay and Ryan Braun.
Pence, Bay, and Braun – infield hit machines? You could have given me 1,000 guesses, and I’d have never come up with those three names. I’m sure there’s a real correlation between infield hits and speed (Ichiro doesn’t get 57 infield hits in 2004 if he runs like Prince Fielder), but there’s pretty clearly a big luck factor as well.
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Would it have something to do with guys that hit for power, leading the infield (especially third base) to play back a little bit, but also have respectable speed so that when they get jammed and hit a swinging bunt down the third base line they have enough speed to make it down the line since the third baseman has to play back in respect of their power?
Well, that was a long run-on sentence, but I think you get my meaning.