When a position player converts to being a pitcher, it’s because he sees a better future for himself on the mound than at the plate, but it’s not like he suddenly forgets how to hit. He may not have been as good at hitting as his peers, hence the more attractive path on the mound, but he still should be better at hitting than a normal pitcher would be, right? If you get drafted as a hitter, and paid money as a hitter, even if you turn out not to be very good at it, you’re still apt to be better at it than the guys who were pitchers since high school and never were seen as hitters at all.
But that wasn’t the case with Tim Wakefield.
Drafted as a first baseman, he was such a bad hitter as a professional that he was poor even for pitchers. The Pirates had taken him in the 8th round of the 1988 draft because he’d absolutely raked while playing at Florida Tech. He set school records there for homers, slugging, and RBI, and was all-conference in his final college season. They put him in the school’s Hall of Fame way back in 1993 and retired his number. And yet none of that translated to professional baseball.
In his first season with the Low-A Watertown Pirates of the New York-Penn League, Wakefield batted .189 and hit just three homers in nearly 200 plate appearances. He managed to draw a fair number of walks, so he posted a respectable .328 on-base percentage, but a first baseman who slugs .308 in Low-A doesn’t have much big league future.
The next year he even lost the ability to get on base and had a combined batting line of .217/.255/.330 between two different A-Ball teams, and he never got any better. After an eventual 17-year major league career that saw him accumulate 130 plate appearances, Wakefield’s big league batting line was .117/.148/.162. That translated to an OPS+ mark of -16. For comparison, his teammate with the Red Sox in the late 1990s, Bret Saberhagen, was a pitcher his entire professional career, having never once drawn a paycheck for his ability to hit a baseball, and yet he had a .121/.177/.142 batting line and -13 OPS+, just a touch better than Wakefield. Clearly he was going to need a different path to the big leagues.
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