Sometimes You Hit the Ball, Sometimes the Ball Hits You

If you were looking for differences between collegiate and professional baseball, you wouldn’t have to try very hard to find them. One of my favorites is the value and frequency of the hit-by-pitch.

College hitters get plunked more often than big leaguers for three reasons: First, college pitchers have worse command, as a rule, than their professional counterparts. Second, while the quality of play is high in college baseball, it’s not quite high enough to weed out all the weirdos. So you’ll get guys with no nerve endings in one of their arms who are quite happy to trade a welt for a free trip to first base.

Third, there’s a subtle difference in the hit-by-pitch rule between college and professional baseball. MLB Rule 5.05(b)(2) states:

“The batter becomes a runner and is entitled to first base without liability to be put out (provided he advances to and touches first base) when: He is touched by a pitched ball which he is not attempting to hit unless (A) The ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, or (B) The batter makes no attempt to avoid being touched by the ball;”

So a batter has to make an attempt to avoid getting hit by a pitch. Enforcement is, and to some degree has to be, spotty. Usually, turning to present a less painful impact zone — such as the back instead of the ribs or the elbow — counts as making an effort to avoid the ball.

Here’s Rule 8, Section 2.d. of the NCAA baseball rulebook:

The batter becomes a base runner: When hit by a pitched ball at which the individual is not attempting to strike, the ball is immediately dead;

1) A batter may not make a movement to intentionally get hit by the pitch, regardless of the location of the pitch. The batter must also avoid being hit whenever possible, unless the pitch is within the batter’s box occupied by the batter. If the batter’s action is deemed intentional, then:

a) If the ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, or if the batter moves to intentionally get hit or freezes to allow a pitch that is not within the batter’s box to hit them, the ball is dead, it shall be called a strike and the batter is not awarded first base.

b) If the ball is within the batter’s box occupied by the batter and the batter makes no movement to intentionally get hit by the pitch, the batter is awarded first base. In other words, a batter who freezes inside the batter’s box and who is hit by the pitch shall be awarded first base.

So if the pitch is within the batter’s box, the batter can just let it hit him. As long as he doesn’t move into the pitch intentionally, he gets to go to first, whether he tries to get out of the way or not.

People whose baseball-watching diet skews mostly toward the pro game might quite reasonably wonder 1) if interpretation and enforcement of this rule ever becomes a contentious issue and 2) how frequently this subtle rule difference gets taken advantage of. The answer to both questions is “almost constantly.”

Longtime readers of my work (or Ben Lindbergh podcast completists) might be familiar with former University of Buffalo outfielder Nick Sinay, who got plunked 48 times in 541 collegiate plate appearances, and because he was a 70-grade runner, took advantage of those opportunities to steal 73 bases and score 93 runs in the equivalent of one major league season.

Sinay got drafted by the Blue Jays and didn’t last too long in the minors. He hit .229 and accumulated only 18 extra-base hits in 171 minor league games, but he retired with 87 walks and 70 HBPs in that time, including 38 plunkings in just 293 plate appearances his final year. Because of all of that, Sinay retired with a higher career professional OBP — .412 across all levels — than Joey Votto or Rickey Henderson.

Does this work on a team level? You bet. In 2023, Jake Mintz wrote about the Misericordia University Cougars, who wore an average of three pitches a game en route to a berth in the Division III World Series. (As an aside, there have been a lot of jokes recently about being able to tell which articles I wrote just from the headline. I just want everyone to acknowledge that I’ve never descended as far into self-parody as Jake doing a huge feature on some weird DIII grinder nonsense.)

We’re entering the fourth week of the 2025 Division I regular season, and with teams playing four or five times a week, that means most starting position players have appeared in between 12 and 15 individual games. Would you like to know who leads the country in being hit by pitches?

Four players are tied for the lead at 11. Four others have been hit 10 times. If you played 15 games and got hit as many times per game as single-season major league record-holder Ron Hunt, who got plunked 50 times in 1971, you would only have been hit five times. (My editor Matt Martell said actually Hughie Jennings got hit 51 times in 1896, but I told that nerd to get lost. Who cares what happened in 1896? You might as well tell me how many pitches Methuselah got hit by.)

In order to figure out how they’re doing it, I’ve plucked — not plunked, plucked — three recidivist pitch-wearers from at or near the top of the leaderboard.

Let’s start with Jesse Herrera, the senior designated hitter at Texas Southern. TSU is an interesting program, an HBCU located in Houston, which means that it’s got access to some of the best amateur talent in the country but gets swamped by bigger programs nearby: Rice, Houston, and Texas A&M are right in TSU’s backyard; TCU, LSU, and Texas are within half a day’s drive.

But under longtime head coach Michael Robertson, the Tigers are usually pretty competitive. That’s because they’re good at finding creative ways to score runs. In 2022, in a 53-game season, five different Tigers players stole 20 or more bases, led by Johnathon Thomas, who stole 62.

This year, they’ve been leading off Herrera, who stands just 5-foot-8 but has an exquisitely manicured mustache.

Here’s Herrera’s batting stance.

You’ll notice he’s basically right on top of the plate. And even if he doesn’t find a tailing fastball to lean into or a back-foot breaking ball to freeze on, he’s perfectly willing to just stick a leg out and dare the umpire to pull him back home.

Here he is at the moment of impact. You’ll notice that while he’s turned his back to the pitch in a standard freeze-and/or-avoid maneuver, his front foot is now on the chalk of the batter’s box, and he is looking the ball into his calf.

That’s how you get hit 11 times in 51 plate appearances. You might’ve noticed in the first screenshot that Herrera, in addition to being a short guy, hits from a crouched stance. If you thought college pitchers might have trouble hitting a strike zone that small, you’d be correct. Herrera, in addition to his 11 HBPs, has 12 walks on the season against only eight hits. That results in two hilarious ratios: First, Herrera is currently rocking a .608 OBP. Just on that basis alone he’s got to be one of the best leadoff hitters in the country.

Second, Herrera has 51 plate appearances but only 28 at-bats so far this season. Out of 2,337 qualified hitters, Herrera has the second-lowest ratio of at-bats to plate appearances (54.9%) in the entire country.

But he doesn’t have the highest ratio of HBPs to games played. That honor goes to Michigan State outfielder JT Sokolove, who’s gotten hit 11 times in 11 games. He, too, has more HBPs than hits (11 to 10).

Sokolove has a slightly open stance that he closes on his stride. That brings him closer to the plate and allows him to execute a subtle drop of his elbow into the path of a pitch on the inside corner. As seen here, against Harvard righty Truman Pauley.

And then again, against the same pitcher, one inning later.

To be fair, Pauley didn’t need much help. He hit three batters and walked five in four innings pitched. In fact, Harvard pitchers combined to hit five batters in just seven innings that night. Elite assaults on public education continue on all fronts, it seems.

Sokolove’s elbow lean is effective, but it’s almost brazen. So I’d like to close with Arizona outfielder Aaron Walton, who’s not at the top of the national HBP leaderboard, but he does lead the Big 12 with eight plunkings in just 11 games at 50 plate appearances.

Walton is a junior who transferred in from Samford over the winter. Good college players don’t all develop the same way. Actually, the top three picks in the 2023 draft provide a decent sampling. Some players show up for their first day of fall practice freshman year and are already the best player on the team (Dylan Crews). Others struggle or ride the bench for a while, then something clicks out of nowhere and they become overnight stars (Wyatt Langford).

Others develop gradually over the course of multiple seasons: Good as a freshman, very good as a sophomore, elite as a junior (Paul Skenes). Walton is that, but for getting hit by pitches.

Walton got plunked once in 90 plate appearances as a freshman, then got hit 12 times in 226 PA as a sophomore — which doesn’t sound like a lot compared to the guys we were just talking about, but that’s the equivalent of a 30-HBP major league season, and is worth 53 points of OBP.

This year, he’s worn it eight times in just 11 games. I saw that and looked up some game tape, expecting to find him standing right on top of the plate like Herrera.

Not so. He’s not way in the back corner of the box or anything, but with his open stance, Walton’s front foot is almost in the dead center of the batter’s box. It’s entirely unremarkable.

So look how far he strides toward the plate when Andrew Mosiello of San Diego comes inside.

And he’s not just doing it because he’s found a pitch he can throw his elbow at. I found another HBP of his against Rice (which I’m not using because the video quality was so poor) where he ended up with his toes on the chalk against a pitch that almost hit him in the neck.

We got ice.

I would love to see MLB adopt the college hit-by-pitch rule. It’d offer a creative way for players to generate offense, it’d diversify the style of play, and it would punish the 30-command one-inning fastball-slider relievers who I believe are at the core of everything that ails this great game of ours.

Maybe it wouldn’t change much. Maybe soaking up errant pitches is only attractive if you’re a young man with no concept of your own mortality. Maybe it’s bush league. But you can’t deny this: These guys want to win more than you do.

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