You Have to Be Pretty Good to Be Really Bad: Double Plays

This is another post about Carlos Correa.

The only thing worse than making one out at the plate is making multiple outs at once.

The worst possible outcome is the triple play: three outs on one pitch. These are incredibly rare; we only get about five per season throughout Major League Baseball. They’re also quite often not the batter’s fault. Like, c’mon. Is AJ Pollock really to blame here?

So any stats on triple plays are absolutely meaningless, but I do want to note that the only player ever to ground into four triple plays in their MLB career is Hall-of-Famer Brooks Robinson. Funny how that works.

Far more common is the double play. On average, teams hit into double plays about three-quarters of a time per game, a number that has remained pretty much stagnant since this stat became consistently tracked in 1949. That’s about 120 double plays per team per season.

For players, it’s common for the league-leading double play total to be in the mid- to upper 20s. But every once in a blue moon, a player has the unfortunate distinction of hitting into 30 double plays. That player is usually Jim Rice.

Like Mark Reynolds with strikeouts, Rice “accomplished” this “feat” three years in a row and came just shy of making it four. He became so infamous for getting doubled up that the groundbreaking sabermetric guide The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball included this excellent passage.

“Suppose that we have two similar hitters to put into these slots, except for their double play rates. One of the two batters hits into tons of double plays; 20% of the time a DP situation is in effect, he hits into a DP. (This would work out to about 30 DP in a season.) We’re going to call this batter Rim Jice.”

If Jim Rice loved making outs so much, you’d expect him to make a lot of them even when he wasn’t hitting into double plays. Again, you’d be wrong. Rice hit well above league average in all three of those seasons, was an All-Star each year, and earned MVP votes and a Silver Slugger in two of them. He’s also in the Hall of Fame.

You Have to Be Pretty Good to Hit Into 30 Double Plays

Rice isn’t the only one! Of the 18 player-seasons that have included 30+ double plays, eight of them have been from players who wound up in Cooperstown.

Some of the best hitters of all time are on this list, as is Casey McGehee. Iván Rodríguez even won the American League MVP in 1999 while hitting into 31 double plays. Seven of these seasons were All-Star seasons, and three of those that weren’t still earned MVP votes at the end of the year.

We’ve even had a guy hit into 32 double plays while also leading their league in steals—a very low league-leading total, granted, but impressive nonetheless given a high double play count usually indicates a lack of speed. The usual culprits are sluggers who hit the ball hard enough for it to reach the defense quickly but aren’t fast enough to beat out two throws. They’re also usually right-handed hitters, as the right-handed batter’s box is a few feet farther from first base than the left-handed batter’s box is.¹

This all was the case for Carlos Correa, who last year just barely became the first new member of the 30-DP club since 2014, grounding into his 30th in his very last plate appearance of the season.

Carlos Correa, 2023 Twins

As with the last piece, I’d like to dive deeper into the 30-DP seasons in which the player hit below league average, of which there are five.

Carlos is the reason this entire series exists. I did most of this research in late July, when he had hit into 19 double plays and was on pace for the 30 he would eventually reach. He was running a wRC+ of about 90 for the whole season and couldn’t quite get it back up to league average by year’s end.

Of course, Correa got so many plate appearances because the Twins had just re-signed him to a 6-year/$200M contract in the offseason and spent most of the season in the thick of a playoff race. He’s a career 125-wRC+ hitter and had just hit for a 140 wRC+ in 2022, so the Twins wanted his bat in the lineup.

The reason he grounded into so many double plays is just as simple: he was playing through plantar fasciitis all year. It’s hard to run out ground balls when your foot is injured. But, per Statcast, he was also in the 75th percentile in Hard Hit%, so he was still blistering the ball.² That’s a good thing when you’re hitting line drives, but when you hit it straight at the infielders, it makes it incredibly easy for a major league defense to turn two on you.

Minus the injury, Correa’s season is somewhat reminiscent of 1983 Tony Armas.

Tony Armas, 1983 Red Sox

In 1982, the Boston Red Sox had a problem: they had two good third basemen—Carney Lansford and Wade Boggs—and no good center fielders. Of course, this is why trades were invented, so they sent the less promising Lansford to Oakland in return for established, slugging center fielder Tony Armas.

Unfortunately, Armas didn’t quite live up to expectations in his first year in Boston, but they gave up too much for him to just sit on the bench, so that’s how the 1983 Red Sox had two players hit into 31 double plays, a feat made even more impressive by the fact that they almost always hit back-to-back in the lineup. (A lineup which, I might add, also still included an ancient Carl Yastrzemski, who himself hit into 30 double plays 19 years earlier.)

Miguel Tejada, 2008 Astros

This one’s the funniest to me.

Miguel Tejada raced out to an excellent .947 OPS through April, then treaded water just long enough to earn an All-Star nod. At the midseason break, he’d only hit into 11 double plays: not even close to a 30-DP pace.

But in the second half, the hitting never picked back up to its April pace and Tejada started grounding into double plays like nobody’s business. He hit as many twin-killings in August alone as he did in the entire first half, then added seven more in September for good measure.

He grounded into one double play through May 8 and somehow ended the season with 32.

This is the only season when Tejada grounded into 30+ double plays, but it’s actually just one of three times he led the majors in this stat. He’d also hit into an MLB-leading 28 with the Orioles in 2006, and he followed his masterpiece 2008 Astros performance with another MLB-leading 29 double plays for the 2009 Astros.³

Houston was also the home of the worst-hitting 30-DP season ever.

Brad Ausmus, 2002 Astros

Brad Ausmus’ 76 wRC+ over 496 plate appearances in 2002 is actually right in line with his 76 wRC+ over 7101 plate appearances in his career.

In both the short term here and the long term throughout his career, he earned those plate appearances with his glove. Metrically, FanGraphs lists Ausmus as the 12th most valuable catcher of all time on defense and the 4th least valuable on offense. If you prefer more standard accolades, Ausmus had won the National League Gold Glove at catcher in 2001 and he’d win it again as he grounded into 30 double plays in 2002.

Whether it’s worth giving up so much offensive production for prime defense has long been up for debate (even FanGraphs says Ausmus was only worth 1.0 WAR in 2002, where ~2.0 is usually considered to be the quality of the average major league starter). It’s clear where the Astros stood: broken up by a two-year stint for the Tigers in 1999 and 2000, Ausmus stepped to the plate for the Astros at least 397 times in every season from 1997–2007. That decade included a stretch of four seasons in six years with a wRC+ in the 50s, with his highest wRC+ for Houston sitting at just 93.⁴

Billy Hitchcock, 1950 Athletics

Billy Hitchcock was a rare spectacle: the player who really wasn’t good enough to hit into 30 double plays, but managed to do it anyway through sheer force of will.

The Athletics simply didn’t have anyone better to play second base. They were awful (52-102), and Hitchcock’s production at the plate, however meager, still outpaced his keystone competition. Pete Suder began the year as the team’s starting 2B, but his bat was so terrible (73 wRC+) that he began to lose playing time to Hitchcock in early June and had completely ceded his position by the end of the month.

Hitchcock, of course, couldn’t hit either. You could measure this by pointing to his 81 wRC+ or his mere one home run. I’d prefer to measure it by noting that he managed to ground into 30 double plays in just 447 plate appearances,⁵ which didn’t come close to qualifying for the batting title, even in the shorter 154-game season when that only required 477 PA.

Scroll back up to the table and check out the GIDP% column. Even the most DP-prone hitters only ground into double plays about 5% of the time they come to the plate.⁶ Hitchcock almost hit 7%. That’s ludicrous. He was just so absurdly prolific at hitting into two outs that he crawled across the line to 30 against all odds.

Hitchcock is clearly the outlier here, and he needed a miracle to land on this list in the first place. Even then, while he certainly wasn’t good, he was good enough, and for our purposes, that’s all that matters.⁷ Because you know what they say.

You have to be pretty good to be really bad.

The all-time career leader in double plays? Albert Pujols. Inner-circle, first-ballot Hall-of-Famer as soon as he becomes eligible in 2028. He actually set this record on August 4, 2017, and then continued playing for more than five full seasons after the fact, grounding into 75 more double plays and rendering the record probably unbreakable.

Nine of the top ten all-time leaders in double plays are either already in the Hall of Fame or will be very soon. The tenth is Julio Franco, who played in the majors until he was 49.

I can’t quite say the same about our next statistic. Speaking of being too slow…

Chapter 1: Strikeouts
Chapter 2: Double plays
Chapter 3: Caught stealing(s?)
Chapter 4: Walks
Chapter 5: Hits

1. Carl Yastrzemski is the outlier here. He’s grounded into the most double plays of any left-handed hitter in history.

2. He actually tore his plantar fascia entirely on September 18, allowing him to recover more quickly than he would from lingering discomfort. He sat out the remainder of the regular season but returned for the postseason, where he hit for a 1.004 OPS in 24 plate appearances. Of those 24 PAs, four were double play chances. He didn’t hit into a double play. Small sample size, yes, but still encouraging to me as a Twins fan.

3. Tejada also grounded into 24 double plays for the 2004 Orioles and 26 double plays for the 2005 Orioles, both of which led the American League but not the majors. A.J. Pierzynski (27) and Aramis Ramírez (25) both had him beat in ‘04 and Sean Casey (27) had him beat in ‘05.

4. I specify “for Houston” here because he managed to hit for a 102 wRC+ with the 1999 Tigers. It’s the only time he ever hit above league average over a full season in which he qualified for the batting title.

5. Hitchcock’s 1 HR in 447 PA somehow wasn’t the worst ratio of 1950. That honor goes to Johnny Pesky, who only hit 1 HR in 602 PA. Pesky also walked 17.2% of the time he came to the plate and notched a 114 wRC+.

6. This includes every plate appearance, not just the ones in which grounding into a double play was actually possible. Over a large enough sample, this shouldn’t matter.

7. Naturally, Hitchcock would go on to become the president of MiLB’s Southern League for a decade. Auburn, his alma mater, renamed their baseball field for him in 2003.