Hall of Fame Hitters Who Pitched

Shohei Ohtani is now pitching again, a minor bit of news that might have escaped your attention since ESPN only put it one their main baseball page three times on Monday, and MLB.com hid it at the top of their “Latest News.”

Just kidding, obviously. Ohtani’s return to the mound has been covered pretty exhaustively, for the obvious reason that we simply don’t see people who can hit like he does also pitch in the big leagues. We’ve seen it before, something covered here and elsewhere in recent years thanks to Ohtani, but his predecessors did it before most of us were alive. That makes his dual-threat accomplishments unique and noteworthy.

Still, it’s been reported to death, and that makes it less fun to write about now. Let’s see how his arm comes back from his injury before we focus on his pitching too much, especially since there’s plenty to focus on with the rest of his game, like the fact that he’s leading the league in homers. Again.

Less well-known than Ohtani’s exploits are a few other pretty good ballplayers who pitched a bit. And I don’t mean the Babe Ruths and Bullet Rogans of the world. They pitched more than a bit. At times they pitched more than they played the field, and were as exceptional at both as Ohtani, maybe more so. They’ve rightly been given their flowers for that, including by me.

Instead of looking at the guys who pitched a good amount, let’s instead note the Hall of Famers hitters who barely pitched at all. There are 21 members of the Baseball Hall of Fame who pitched a little bit in the big leagues. And by “little bit” I mean they pitched five games or fewer. For some of them we don’t have a lot of information. For instance, seven of them did their brief bit of pitching in the Negro Leagues, and we just don’t have any game logs for them. They were: