The Worst Hitting Position Player Ever

The extreme offensive ineptitude of the free agent catchers (as a group) available this year has got me to thinking about the catcher who was almost certainly the worst hitting position player ever to have a significant major league career.  That player is catcher Bill Bergen, who played semi-regularly for eleven seasons for the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Superbas/Trolley Dodgers between 1901 and 1911.

This was during major league baseball’s greatest pitchers’ era, even better than the years from 1963 through 1968.  Even so, Bergen’s batting totals were just astoundingly bad.  Bergen had a career .170 batting average, a career .201 slugging percentage, and (according to Baseball Almanac) a career .395 OPS.  Wow!

What’s even more amazing is how regularly Bergen played.  His hitting was so poor that he was never a true starter.  However, except for 1907 when he was limited to 138 at-bats (was he injured that year?), he accumulated between 207 and 353 at-bats in ten different seasons.

To give Bergen his due, in 1903, he hit a lusty .227.  It was the only season in his career in which he hit better than .190.

It goes without saying that Bergen must have been one of the three or four best defensive catchers anywhere is organized (white professional) baseball.  While the period from 1901 through 1911 seems early in major league baseball’s history today, at that point even the worst major teams didn’t have to put up with a catcher who hit like Bergen unless he brought a lot to the table defensively.

Needless to say, however, the teams on which Bergen played were not good teams.  In his eleven seasons his teams finished with a record above .500 exactly once and finished at .500 one more time.  No matter how good his defense was, it’s hard to win when you are giving hundreds of plate appearances each season to player hits as poorly as Bergen did, even in the dead-ball era.

To give you an accurate idea of just how bad Bergen was as a hitter, even in his own era, I decided to compare him to every National League pitcher (Bergan played exclusively in the NL) who played at least semi-regularly (roughly 100 IP) for eight or more seasons between 1900 and 1919.  (Please not that I excluded players like Walter “The Big Train” Johnson, who met the ten year criteria, but got a lot of at-bats in the lively-ball era beginning with the 1920 season. I also excluded pitchers who played significantly before 1898, which was about the time the batting numbers really started to drop.)

Here’s what I found: