What’s the de Santiago Line, and Why Should You Care?

You’ll have to bear with me at the start of this one, because I’m feeling expansive today. This article is about baseball trivia, but I’m getting there in an oblique way. It starts in Magnus Effect Baseball, but don’t worry, MLB fans, we won’t be staying there long on this winding journey to some fun facts.

I have a prospect crush on one of my virtual Phillies: a 17-year-old third baseman named Izzy de Santiago. He’s absolutely crushing the Dominican Summer League in 102 plate appearances, to the tune of a .375/.412/.583 line. His skillset is expansive; he hits for power and average and rarely swings and misses. He also has a huge infield arm and blazing straight-line speed. He looks like a potential future star, in fact. There’s just one problem:

My guy can’t take a walk to save his life, and he’s not projected to learn how to. Despite that huge hole in his game, he still has an OBP higher than his batting average, and it’s for one key reason: he’s quite good at getting hit by pitches. He’s racked up six so far in his abbreviated season, a frankly stunning pace. Six more HBPs than walks sounded extreme to me — and then I started spiraling back into the real world.

In 2021, no one in the major leagues even came close to matching the imaginary Mr. de Santiago. Tim Locastro, Luke Raley, Eddy Alvarez, and Aramis Garcia each managed two more HBPs than walks, and only 17 players — nine of them pitchers who never drew a walk — even managed a positive HBP-minus-walk differential.

That’s not a very interesting article, but never fear: we can go deeper. The de Santiago Line (six more HBPs than walks) has only been beaten six times since 1900. You’ve probably heard of a few of the players who have done it — I’ve already mentioned one in this article, for example — but get ready for a trip down memory lane, to the six seasons in baseball history where a player was shockingly bad at being drawing a walk and shockingly good at being hit by a pitch on a relative basis.

Reed Johnson, 2014, +7

Johnson, who played for six teams across 13 major league seasons, had a career that was easy to miss and yet deceptively in demand. Average outfield defense combined with an average bat might sound boring, but teams can always use that kind of production, as you might guess given the aforementioned 13 years. He had a banner 2006 — .319/.390/.479 and 4.4 WAR — and occasional flashes of excellence aside from that. Did he hold on too long at the end of his career? Perhaps; in his last three years, he hit .238/.282/.340 and put up -0.8 WAR.

On the other hand, no! If Johnson hadn’t played out the string, we wouldn’t have received the gift of his 2014 season. Never a patient hitter in the best of times, the bottom completely fell out of his plate discipline that year. Maybe it was an effort to stave off declining power. Maybe it was just a bad year; his overall line was a gruesome .235/.266/.348. But Johnson swung at a whopping 47% of pitches outside the strike zone and said goodbye to his walks. He walked once — once! — in 201 plate appearances.

Luckily for his on-base percentage, Johnson had always been hit by pitches at an above-average rate — three times the league-average rate, to be precise. In 2014, he managed even a bit better than that, drawing eight HBPs, or 4% of his PAs. Eight minus one makes seven, and so there you have one way to make this list: get hit at a solid clip and spontaneously lose your ability to draw a walk.

Dan McGann, 1901, +7

Like Johnson, McGann played for a number of teams in his career. Unlike Johnson, he was quite good, hitting .284/.364/.381 across 12 seasons and functioning as a key cog on the 1902–06 John McGraw-led Giants. He was a player with no obvious modern counterpart; he stole 282 bases, played first base, and hit 100 triples as compared to only 42 home runs.

Unlike Johnson, McGann knew how to draw a walk. He posted a career walk rate of 7.1%, slightly higher than the league as a whole over the course of his career. He also knew how to get on base via getting hit; he was hit by a pitch in 4% of his career plate appearances, miles above the baseline in those times.

The 1901 season wasn’t McGann’s best year for getting hit; that would be 1899, when he was plunked 37 times in 576 plate appearances. But 1901, his first year with the Cardinals, featured uncharacteristically poor patience. He walked only 3.4% of the time, by far a career low. Meanwhile, he got hit just like normal: 23 times, or 4.9% of his plate appearances.

McGann’s season was essentially an upscale version of Johnson’s: a sudden loss in walks with no accompanying deterioration in HBP skill (as an aside, what should we call this? I really don’t know the word for the ability to get hit by pitches). Johnson was barely playable in his 2014 season; he was worth half a win below replacement and quickly lost playing time. McGann, meanwhile, was still a useful player despite his low walk rate, hitting .272/.333/.392, 10% above league average.

More important to me, though, is what a fascinating player McGann was! His SABR biography highlights a sterling career and tragic life. A base-stealing threat who hit for above-average power for his day, he was one of the best first basemen in the league at his peak, but that peak didn’t last for long, and he took his own life only two years after he left the majors. For those few years, though, he was a glorious and rare combination. Think early-career Paul Goldschmidt, only with many more steals — an archetype that basically doesn’t exist anymore.

Tim Locastro, 2019, +8

Locastro is a consistent baseball magnet. He’s +5 for his career — 36 HBPs and 31 walks. The 2019 season is the only one where he’s reached 200 plate appearances, and it was a unicorn season, as he was hit twenty-two times in exactly 250 PA. That’s a single-season record for times hit by a pitch with less than 300 plate appearances, and the closest player to him is Hall of Famer Hughie Jennings, who racked up 19 in 275 PA in 1899. (Fun fact: in that 1899 season, Jennings had an arm injury that forced him to play first base rather than his natural shortstop, which led the Brooklyn Bridegrooms to trade McGann, kick-starting his whirlwind journey across the league.)

But back to Locastro! His huge HBP numbers were his best weapon in a strange but valuable season. He stole 17 bases without being caught, on his way to a record for successful steals to start a career. He really didn’t have any other useful offensive skills, walking 5.6% of the time and running a minuscule .090 ISO. His entire offensive value was in getting on base and then causing mayhem on the bases, and despite that, pitchers just kept hitting him, giving him exactly what he wanted.

Locastro has never approached those HBP heights again. He was hit on 8.8% of his plate appearances in that 2019 season; in the rest of his career combined, he’s been hit 5.5% of the time. Even in the minors, where pitchers are wilder on average, he ran a 6.3% career HBP rate. For one magical season, though, he put up a hilarious statline — .250/.357/.340 with a 5.6% walk rate — and earned his way onto this extremely un-prestigious all-time leaderboard.

Whitey Alperman, 1906, +8

There are many distinguished historical baseball players I’ve never heard of. Alperman isn’t one of those. He had a brief major league career (1906–09) and hit an uninspiring .237/.268/.331 for some terrible Brooklyn Superbas teams. To the extent that WAR from 100 years ago is a meaningful statistic, he accrued only 2.2 wins worth of it in those four seasons. Not everyone can be a star.

But as the Baseball Reference Bullpen notes, Alperman “is mildly famous for a couple of things. First, his intense dislike of getting a walk, and second, his tendency to get hit by a pitch.” Now we’re talking! His silliest claim to fame is his 0.5% walk rate in 1909, the lowest single-season rate of the 20th century (minimum 300 PA). He walked only 1.2% of the time in 1906, and only 1.7% of the time for his career — a true standout in refusing to take a walk.

Alperman didn’t get hit like his contemporaries McGann and Jennings; his career HBP rate was a run-of-the-mill 2.4%. But if you absolutely refuse to walk, any number of HBPs will dwarf your walks, and that’s what happened in 1906, when he walked only six times in 487 PA. Willians Astudillo would blush at these numbers, and it’s not an era issue; walk rates then closely resembled today’s game. All that remained for Alperman was to get hit a few times, which he was — 14 times, to be precise. There’s your +8 for a player best known for his comical aversion to walks.

Art Fletcher, 1915, +8

Mostly unknown today, Fletcher was one of those characters who made early baseball feel like a fairy tale. He’s more Hall of Very Good than Hall of Fame, but he played from 1909 to ’22, anchored later incarnations of John McGraw’s Giants, and was famous at the time for his propensity to get hit by pitches. He led the NL in HBPs in 1913, ’14, ’16, ’17, and ’18; amusingly, the only season where he didn’t was 1915, when he put up his career-best HBP-minus-walk tally.

In most years, Fletcher was too good of a hitter to appear on this list. In 1917, for example, he was hit by 19 pitches, his highest single-season mark. He also walked 23 times, though; no good if you’re trying to secure a spot on my meaningless list (though his on-base prowess and sterling defense were worth 6.6 WAR that year). In his career, he walked 203 times and was hit by a pitch only 141 times.

What happened in 1915? You guessed it: a curious lack of walks. His 1% walk rate was the lowest of his career by a fair margin, and he continued to get hit at roughly his average clip. That cratered his on-base percentage, naturally enough; his .280 mark was his lowest in a full season. After that down year, he regained a bit of his never-high-to-begin-with patience, but that momentary lapse was enough to snag him a spot here.

Fletcher’s SABR biography is also worth a read. He started his career by annoying McGraw so much during an exhibition game that the legendary Giants manager signed him directly from his Texas League squad. “I was a pretty fresh busher,” Fletcher said of that performance, in a reminder that words don’t make very much sense when you read them 100 years later.

Later in his career, Fletcher did everything you can imagine. He managed Babe Ruth. He took a one-year sabbatical from baseball due to deaths in his family and returned to play 110 games the next year. He got kicked out of a game for insulting an umpire, then convinced a teammate to hang a giant sign in centerfield that featured a nickname the umpire hated. He even invented a proto-humidor; when he was managing the Phillies in the homer-prone Baker Bowl, he kept game balls in a freezer overnight to limit their carry. Baseball was wild in the 1910s and ’20s.

Brandon Guyer, 2016, +12

The GOAT of getting hit by pitches, Guyer’s mark will probably never be topped. His 2016 season is like nothing else on this list. Everyone else got above the de Santiago line by refusing to walk. Guyer did it by getting hit all the time — a whopping 31 HBPs in only 345 plate appearances.

For a mid-power platoon bat, Guyer actually showed a decent eye at the plate, with a career 6.1% walk rate. His 2016 wasn’t a disaster in that area, though it was below average for him; he checked in at 5.5%. But left-handed pitchers had no idea how to throw to him without hitting him. He faced them 152 times on the year and got plunked 20 times, an inconceivable 13.2% HBP rate.

It’s only fitting that the list of high-HBP/low-walk seasons ends with the king of getting hit — and make no mistake, Guyer is the king. He never achieved such a gaudy HBP total again, and in fact, he walked more often than he was hit in his career, but he’s a true outlier in the modern game: a player who ran a solid .339 career OBP almost exclusively because he knew how to take pitches and how to get hit by them.

To bring things back around to the initial premise of this article, the Izzy de Santiago profile is actually a pretty realistic way to end up with more HBPs than walks, as long as you’re playing in the early 1900s. Back then, more players had the equivalent of de Santiago’s 20 eye on a 20–80 scale. The two modern players who have reached ridiculous HBP-minus-walk numbers have done it though outsized HBP totals and acceptable walk numbers. It’s a tough “skill” to master; even Locastro and Guyer, the two best avatars of the statistic, don’t consistently get hit more often than they walk.

Getting hit by a pitch more frequently than you walk isn’t a meaningful ratio in and of itself. It doesn’t tell us anything about how valuable a player will be, or what you can expect from them in the next year. It’s useless if you want to make your team better. But if you want to find a bunch of weirdos who put up baseball statistics that in almost no way resemble the way you think about the game — and also learn about the strange lives of the pioneers of the early game — the de Santiago line, a contrived number based on a fictional player, is a wonderful starting point.