Guy Hecker

Guy Hecker did two things at the highest level of baseball, and he did them at the same time. He won 52 games on the mound in 1884, a total only three pitchers in history have ever beaten, and two years later he won a batting title, the only pitcher who ever has. He once scored seven runs in a single game, a record that has stood for nearly a century and a half, and hit three home runs in the same afternoon. For a few seasons in the American Association he stood with Bob Caruthers and Tony Mullane as a two way force, a man who could beat you with his arm or his bat as the day required. No pitcher before or since has matched the two things he did at once.

Pitcher and Hitter Both

Hecker was born Guy Jackson Hecker on April 3, 1856, in Youngsville, Pennsylvania, and reached the major leagues with the Louisville Eclipse of the American Association in 1882. He arrived as a pitcher, a big right hander with a hopping fastball and an arm that seemed never to tire, and he could have built a fine career on the mound alone. What set him apart was the bat he carried the rest of the week. When he was not pitching he played first base or the outfield and hit as well as the regulars, a genuine double threat in an age that rarely produced one. Few men have ever been trusted to do both jobs, and fewer still did them as well as Hecker.

The Pitcher's Triple Crown

In 1884 Hecker turned in one of the great pitching seasons the game has seen. He won 52 games and lost 20, threw more than 670 innings, and led the entire American Association in wins, earned run average, and strikeouts, a pitching Triple Crown for a workhorse in his prime. His earned run average that year was 1.80, his strikeouts 385, his complete games 72, the numbers of a man who took the ball and never handed it back. Only three pitchers in the history of baseball have ever won more games in a season. He had already thrown a hitless game two years earlier, in September 1882, the second in the young Association's history, and 1884 confirmed everything that game had hinted.

The Only Pitcher to Win a Batting Title

Two years after his pitching masterpiece, Hecker did something no other pitcher has done before or since. In 1886 he hit .341, the highest average in the American Association, and became the only pitcher in major league history credited with a batting title. The honor was not his at the time, because the league recognized other men as its leading hitters that season, and only later did researchers comb back through the records and hand Hecker the crown. The retroactive title fits the player, though, because Hecker really could hit, a .282 batter across his career who happened to spend half his days pitching. No one else has ever been good enough at both to lead a league in hitting from the pitcher's box.

Seven Runs in a Game

On August 15, 1886, in the second game of a doubleheader against Baltimore, Hecker put together the single greatest hitting day any pitcher has had. He went six for seven at the plate, hit three home runs, and scored seven runs, a single game record that no player has matched in all the years since. Louisville won the game 22 to 5, with their pitcher doing much of the damage himself. The seven runs still stand alone in the record book, untouched for more than a century and a third. It was the kind of afternoon that sounds invented, except that it happened, every base of it.

In the Company of Caruthers and Mullane

For a stretch in the middle 1880s, Hecker belonged with the best two way players the decade produced, Bob Caruthers and Tony Mullane and a small handful of others. He won well over 100 games on the mound, finished his career around 175 victories against 146 defeats, and batted .282, a line that splits cleanly into two respectable careers. The modern game has no place for a player like him, walling its pitchers off from its hitters, but the 1880s asked men to do everything and rewarded the ones who could. Hecker could. He was, at his peak, two valuable players folded into a single uniform.

The Price of the Workload

The arm that threw 670 innings in a season could not keep doing it forever, and Hecker wore down faster than a lighter workload would have allowed. His effectiveness slipped after 1887 as the innings and the years and the weight caught up with him, and the overpowering fastball lost its hop. He moved to Pittsburgh in 1890 to play and manage, and the season was a disaster, a last place club that lost more than a hundred games under him. He was finished as a front line player by the time he was 34, used up by the very durability that had made him a star. The body that had done the work of two men gave out like one.

After Louisville

Hecker left baseball and went into business, running a sporting goods company and later a grocery store in Wooster, Ohio, where he settled for good. He lived a long, quiet life far from the diamonds where he had been a wonder, dying in Wooster in 1938 at 82, one of the last men alive who had starred in the American Association. Time has treated his record more kindly than the Hall of Fame voters did, because the things he did keep turning up whenever someone goes looking. The list reads like a dare, the only pitcher to win a batting title, seven runs in one game, fifty two wins in a season, and Guy Hecker met every line of it.