To date, the 2022 New York Mets season has brought many wins and many hit-by-pitches. The Mets have the best record in baseball at 14-5, and their batters have been hit by pitches 18 times. No other team has been knocked down more than 11 times.
Three other Mets players, including Pete Alonso, were hit near the head Tuesday night against the St. Louis Cardinals (NY 3, STL 0). Mets pitchers also hit two batters, and it’s important to note that none of the five hit-by-pitches looked intentional. Two came on sliders, one on a changeup, one loaded bases and the other grazed the hitter.
“It’s one of those things, whether it’s intentional or not, it has to stop,” Starling Marte, who was hit by the loaded bases on Tuesday, told the New York Post’s Mike Puma. “We’re sick of it and we need to do something about it if it keeps happening because every time you go out to get hit it’s uncomfortable.”
Mets starter Chris Bassitt, who batted himself Tuesday night, took it a step further. He criticized MLB for current baseball, which he felt was too inconsistent. From Cougar:
“MLB has a very big problem with baseballs — they’re bad,” Bassitt said after his team’s 3-0 win over the Cardinals. “Everybody knows. Every pitcher in the league knows. MLB doesn’t care. They don’t care. We told them our problems with them, they don’t care.”
Bassitt said there are too many inconsistencies between the baseballs used this season and the problem is exacerbated in different climates.
“There’s nothing in common with the balls,” he said. “There is nothing the same, from excursion to excursion.”
Cardinals righty Miles Mikolas, who hit a batter in his start against the Mets Monday night, responded to Bassitt’s comments Wednesday morning: Tell Jeff Jones of the Belleville News-Democrat: “It’s not the ball’s fault. Take responsibility for your actions.”
Teams are getting hit an average of 0.42 times per pitch at the start of this season, and the rate has ranged from 0.40 to 0.46 every year since 2017. It’s ranged from .30 to .39 for the past two decades, and the recent increase in recent years seems as much to do with teams increasingly relying on bullpens and grip-and-rip-it Reliever leave like everything else.
Baseball itself has, of course, been a hot topic in recent years. It’s inconsistent from year to year, and sometimes MLB switches ball on purpose, like when the league muted ball last season (and then used a second livelier ball without telling anyone). In 2019, the year of the home run, pitchers often said the ball was too hard and too slippery, like a cue ball in billiards.
There is also the foreign substance problem. MLB has cracked down on foreign substances over the past year, and players (both pitchers and hitters) claim they are needed for grip, otherwise more batters will get more pitches. That wasn’t the case (score went up even though sticky stuff became popular), but players are sticking with it.
“It’s happened to us as batsmen before, but you can talk to our pitchers and they’ll tell you there’s something with the balls,” Mets catcher James McCann told Puma. “The referees control them and they can’t use things to grab the ball.”
Former Marlins President David Samson discussed Bassitt’s comments on Nothing Personal with David Samson on Wednesday. Listen below:
MLB is attempting to develop a stickier baseball, similar to the ball used in Japan, as well as a stickier rosin. Prototypes were tested in the Arizona Fall League and spring training. It’s unknown how close MLB is to approving a stickier baseball, and when it might arrive in regular-season games.
The Mets are understandably frustrated — who likes being hit by a pitch? – although they are an outlier in the beginning. No other team has been hit nearly as often, and the league-wide hit-by-pitch rate is exactly as it has been in recent years. Baseball may be a problem, but the Mets being hit by so many pitches isn’t proof that the Pittsburgh Pirates, who have been hit by zero pitches (!) so far this year, aren’t proof that the ball is fine the way it is .