Other Crap

Baseball trivia: name a player who has played 20 or more games in 2009 with a batting average twice as high as his previous lifetime average.

Mr. X came into the season hitting .0736. This year he is hitting .147.

In his first full season in the NL, he batted .016. I know that looks like a misprint, but it's the real deal. It was also his slugging average. In 64 at-bats, he had a single. He struck out in 43 of those 64 at bats. He did draw a walk, thus approximately doubling his on base percentage to .031. (The link above provides the answer to Mr. X's identity.)

More trivia. Looking at the same matter from another angle, how'd you like to be that one guy who walked an .016 hitter? It was Kip Wells, then of the Pirates. Kip has always had some control problems. He led all NL pitchers in walks in 2005, and in the past two years has walked 48 guys in just 63 innings. In contrast, Dennis Eckersley took six years to allow about the same number of walks (51 total walks from 1988-1993), and it took him 374 games. What's more, 16 of those Eckersley walks were intentional!

Without studying that box score, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Mr. X did not get an intentional pass from Kip Wells that day.