SORT OF SPORTS
Batter Uses Moronic Hit-by-Pitch Rule to Achieve Perfect on-Base Percentage
It’s technically not cheating
Pete Sprochnek started his baseball career like most kids. He was a little league standout and showed enough talent and commitment to be a star on both his high school and college teams as a pitcher, infielder, and power hitter. He managed to get the attention of enough scouts to get drafted in the 19th round of the Major League Baseball draft. It was hardly a guarantee that he would get a shot at the bigs, but at least his destiny was in his own hands.
Sadly, those hands didn’t have any professional-level talent. Even Single-A ball wasn’t kind to him. After a season and a half in the minors, Pete owned a paltry .196 batting average, and had been relegated to an occasional inning or two in right field after getting consistently lit up as a pitcher and setting a new minor league record for errors per game as an infielder. He knew his dream was about to die. So Pete got creative. He had always been a voracious reader and an outside-the-box thinker. He got himself a rule book and went to work.
Pete couldn’t believe how antiquated the rules of both minor and major league baseball remained. He had just rewatched the original Ghostbusters, and with a little inspiration from the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the team’s tailor, and a tank of oxygen, he was about to change his fortune.
“I used to play a buttload of World of Warcraft, and there was a term we used to describe exploits we found that didn’t fully violate the game’s terms of service. Gamers jokingly called it a ‘clever use of game mechanics.’ Baseball’s idiotic rule about a player’s uniform being considered part of their body for hit-by-pitch purposes was a perfect example of this,” Sprochnek explained.
A few days later, Pete was turning heads all over the minors. Three weeks later, he was making his major league debut. Now he’s played 38 games in the majors, and he has already broken several league records. Pete has yet to be retired as a batter. He has also never swung at a pitch. He has been hit by a pitch in 152 of his 158 at-bats. Pete’s inflated uniform makes it physically impossible for a pitcher to throw a pitch in the strike zone without hitting Pete’s uniform, and therefore his body.
“I’m very unpopular among baseball purists and even in my own locker room and dugout. But they just can’t get rid of me because I get results. I tend to have problems as a baserunner, though,” Pete admitted. “I wish I could say I’m doing this to point out the absurdity of some MLB rules, but I’m really just trying to make a few bucks while I can.”
Pete fully expects some major rule changes in the off-season that will likely end his career, but he is enjoying every minute of his current role and says he is investing his money instead of spending it.
“I wouldn’t say I’m living my dream, but I’m technically playing in the major leagues. So that’s a thing, I guess.”
Update: Pete Sprochnek has missed the last three games due to concussion after getting intentionally beaned in the head in all four of his at-bats in his last game played.
