I wrote a piece for today’s edition of
, with the focus being the poor collection of dudes who have a career ERA of infinity. As always, many thanks to the folks at the for allowing me to contribute, and I repeat my recommendation that you should subscribe to their newsletter. Here’s the link to today’s edition:To augment that piece, here’s the list of the 26 players in The Infinity Club:
Most of these guys made the list a long, long time ago, so it’s nice that Gerardo Parra expanded the club in 2019, the first guy to join in fifty years. As you can see, the last couple of players to turn the trick weren’t even pitchers by trade, and I suspect that will be the case moving forward as well, unless some unlucky guy gives up a homer to his first major league batter and suffers a career-ending injury simultaneously.
I’m not sure what the equivalent achievement would be for hitters. I’d say a career batting average of .000, but that’s a really long list. Thousands of players have a career batting average of .000. In fact, 3,067 players, over 13% of the 23,114 major leaguers in history, have a .000 career batting average, from Harry Ables to Tyler Zuber. The most futile of these may be Randy Tate, who pitched for the Mets in 1975, came to bat 47 times, and never got a hit.
Then again, he was a pitcher. It wasn’t his job to hit. The most futile position player was Larry Littleton, left fielder for the Indians in 1981. He played in 26 games that year, got 27 plate appearances, and went 0-for-23 with 3 walks and a sacrifice fly. It’s a bit weird that he has more RBI than hits for his career, but he does.
If we change the measurement to a career OPS of .000, that only cuts the number down to 2,492, so we’ll have to add other qualifiers. If we say they had to have an OPS of .000 and struck out in every plate appearance, that’s still 526 players because lots and lots of modern relief pitchers have been forced to bat one time and struck out. To get it to a really manageable number, we have to say they struck out in every career plate appearance AND came to bat more than once AND weren’t a pitcher by trade. That results in a pretty reasonable number, just 18 players in major league history.
Martin Flaherty, 1881
Tom Murray, 1894
Ed Cernak, 1901 (A career Golden Sombrero; Four plate appearances, four whiffs)
Charlie Loudenslager, 1904
Jim McGarr, 1912 (Also a career Golden Sombrero)
Toots Coyne, 1914
Billy Queen, 1954
John Easton, 1955-1959 (That’s right, he played in one game in 1955 without coming to the plate, then went to the minor leagues, made it back to the big leagues in 1959, and whiffed in his only three at-bats. That’s tough.)
Gabe Gabler, 1958
Gene Ratliff, 1965 (Another Golden Sombrero)
Joe Campbell, 1967
Steve Lomasney, 1999
Jim Chamblee, 2003
Yurendell de Caster, 2006
Clay Timpner, 2008
Tyler Graham, 2012
Tyler Payne, 2021
Brewer Hicklen, 2022 (Our final career Golden Sombrero)
Payne and Hicklen were still playing in the minor leagues as of last season, so they have some hope of getting off this list someday. As for the others, I’m afraid you are permanently in the hitting version of The Infinity Club. Let’s call it the The Futility Club.
That statistics like these exist speaks to some of baseball's uniquely magical underpinnings, and I really appreciate how you can use records and data to highlight parts of the game least concerned with reality. Pitchers with infinite ERAs, hitters who somehow never hit (as you point out, easier to understand). It's kind of fantastical.
And then there's the playing area which is essentially open on two sides, infinitely in play, like the time in 2004 when Adam Dunn hit a home run so hard that it left Great American Ballpark and bounced across the street and into the Ohio River, technically into Kentucky. I like to think that ball somehow made it to the Mississippi and out the Gulf of Mexico, remaining in "fair" territory all the while. Outside of the pitch clock, even time doesn't really work the same. Instead there's innings of measured chances and tries successful and failed. A triple play can end a "sure-thing" inning in a heartbreaking instant, almost from nowhere, while an inning with no outs just goes on, theoretically forever, as long as people keep winding up on base. It's a special game that can hold both infinite failure and endless possibility without any evident discomfort.