Is Jones overrated Defensively?

[luismatos4prez]

At worst, Hardy was 2nd best. There's a good case to be made for him being 1st. Relative to some other awards, that's a great job by the committee.

[weams]

I believe if you are hit by a pitch in the strike zone, it is still just a called strike.

If you swing at a pitch and are hit it is a strike. If you lean in and are hit it is a HBP. But if you keep doing it, after being warned, you might get tossed.

[DrungoHazewood]

Not so. It's up to the umpire's discretion. If he believes the hitter got hit intentionally, which leaning in over the strike zone implies, he does not have to award 1B to the player.

Yes, but we know that in practical terms the discretion is rarely used. I don't know that I've ever been watching a game where someone got hit and wasn't allowed to go to first, and I've seen many thousands of games. I also know I've seen dozens, if not hundreds, of examples where the batter made no discernible move to get out of the way of a pitch that wouldn't have been difficult to avoid.

Of course this might be a bit different if you have a Brobdingnagian "batter" spilling his girth over into the strike zone in an obvious Veeckian attempt at a free base.

[square634]

If you swing at a pitch and are hit it is a strike. If you lean in and are hit it is a HBP. But if you keep doing it, after being warned, you might get tossed.

I don't know how reliable this site is, but it was the first hit I found on Google for the HBP rule. It seems to state that the pitch can't be in the strike zone.

[BobbyWoontz]

During the 60's and 70's, Ron Hunt of the Giants led the Majors 7 straight years of getting HBP:

Hunt, whose motto was, ?Some people give their bodies to science; I give mine to baseball,? had been hit by pitches more often than anyone during his playing days. He led the National League in getting hit by pitches in each of his final seven Major League seasons; in all but his final season (1974), he was the Major League HBP leader, his 16 ?plunks? outdone only by Bobby Grich?s 20. He was hit by 25 pitches in 1968, 25 in 1969, 26 in 1970, 50 in 1971, 26 in 1972 and 24 in 1973.

Hunt said in a July 2000 interview with Baseball Digest that he really began to get hit by pitches after being traded to San Francisco. "But," Hunt asked, "why would you hit me to face Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Jim Ray Hart?" [2]

On September 29, 1971, against the Chicago Cubs at Jarry Park, Hunt was hit by a Milt Pappas pitch to give him 50 on the season, obliterating the post-1900 record of 31 by Steve Evans, although Hughie Jennings still holds the all-time record for 51 HPBs in 1896.[3] Pappas argued to home plate umpire Ken Burkhart that the pitch was directly over the plate, that Hunt got hit by the ball without even trying to get out of the way. Earlier in the year, Pappas had also contributed #27 in the Hunt collection, prompting Cub manager Leo Durocher to cry foul after home plate umpire Augie Donatelli awarded Hunt first base on that pitch. Cincinnati Reds manager Sparky Anderson had a similar complaint after Hunt was hit by a Jim McGlothlin pitch on August 7 of that year; the HBP was Hunt?s 32nd of the season, which broke the National League record set by Steve Evans of the 1910 St. Louis Cardinals.

On April 29, 1969, Hunt tied a Major League record with three HBPs in a game against the Cincinnati Reds. One of those "plunks" was against former Met teammate Jack Fisher.

Hunt always insisted that he never deliberately got hit by a pitch, that he always stood straight up at the plate and simply leaned into the pitch.

Upon his retirement, his 243 HBPs were a career record. Don Baylor would break that record in 1987 and retire with 267 HBPs. Craig Biggio would break Baylor?s career record in 2005 and retire at the end of the 2007 season with 285 HBPs.