The 2018 Reds had the worst pitcher in MLB history
You will not enjoy reading this article. Every aspect of it is completely unfair, including the headline. There is neither a feel-good moral nor a happy ending. Sometimes baseball just sucks.
The Protagonist/Victim
A single outing, no matter how forgettable, should not define a career. Nevertheless, with one appearance for the Cincinnati Reds, right-hander Zack Weiss became the worst pitcher in baseball history.
Weiss was a sixth round draft pick out of UCLA by the Reds in 2013. As is often the case with mid-round picks, he was quickly converted to relief, and he enjoyed immediate success in that role. In 2014, he turned in a stellar 2.42 ERA with 11.4 strikeouts per nine innings in low-A, and followed up the next season with a 1.98 ERA and 12.7 strikeouts per nine across high-A and double-A.
An elbow injury cost him the entire 2016 season, but he rebounded with a 2.63 ERA and 12.3 strikeouts per nine in 2017. He impressed big league manager Bryan Price in Spring Training, who told Cincinnati.com, “I imagine we’ll see him at some point during the year.”
In that statement, Price became an unwitting prophet.
“Point” is an impressive word with myriad definitions (Dictionary.com lists 91 of them). Price intended definition 28 – “an individual part or element of something”, wherein the ‘something’ is the 2018 baseball season. What actually happened was more like definition 13 – “something that has position but not extension, as the intersection of two lines.”
Weiss’ career and the 2018 Reds turned out to be two separate lines extending in differing directions. They could only intersect once: the seventh inning of a home contest against the St. Louis Cardinals on April 12. It did not go well those in question.
The Big Day
The Reds were already losing 5-4 when Weiss opened the inning. The first batter he faced was Jose Martinez:
[KGVID]https://www.offthebenchbaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/HR-1.mp4[/KGVID]
Weiss became one of countless many pitchers to surrender a home run to his very first major league batter. Unfortunately for Weiss and the Reds, St. Louis was just getting started. Next up was Yadier Molina:
[KGVID]https://www.offthebenchbaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/HR-2.mp4[/KGVID]
After Martinez homered on Weiss’ third career pitch, Yadi took him to the upper deck on his sixth. The next batter, Paul DeJong, received a four-pitch walk, and Kolten Wong followed suit by walking on five pitches.
Tanner Rainey came on in relief, ending Weiss’s day – but not his line. Both DeJong and Wong scored (incidentally, Rainey himself walked the next three batters). The final score was Cardinals 13, Reds 4.
Weiss returned to the minor leagues shortly thereafter, but hardly pitched. An injury limited him to just 25 innings, in which he struck out 26 batters but walked 20. The Reds released him on September 1.
While he may latch on with some other organization next year, that’s far from certain. Even if he does, there’s no guarantee he returns to the majors. As it currently stands, his brief MLB career consists of 12 balls and three strikes, two of which landed 388 and 438 feet away.
Historical Significance
There have been 850 pitchers in baseball history to appear in just one MLB game. A fair number of them are position players masquerading on the mound, and there are countless thousands of minor leaguers who never reached the highest level at all.
In this sense, Weiss is better than most. He made it to the majors, even though it was just for an instant. It’s important to keep this in mind before we further dissect just how awful he was in his lone appearance.
Weiss became the first pitcher since 1969 to face at least four batters in his career without recording a single out. Vic Davalillo was the last to do so, but he was really an outfielder. The only other real pitcher to do this in the last 80 years was Fred Bruckbauer in 1961.
There have only been ten verifiable pitchers pitchers in history with at least four batters faced and zero outs (all information courtesy of Baseball-Reference Play Index, without which the tides would cease and the stars extinguish).*
| Player | Year | BF | H | BB | HR | HBP |
| Zack Weiss | 2018 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Vic Davalillo | 1969 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Fred Bruckbauer | 1961 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Mike Palagyi | 1939 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| Jim Schelle | 1939 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| Marty Walker | 1928 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Doc Hamann | 1922 | 7 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| Harry Heitmann | 1918 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| John Wood | 1896 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 1 |
| Bill Childers | 1895 | 7 | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
Clearly, no one on the above chart could define their brief pitching careers as successful. However, there are several different interpretations of which is the worst.
Defining “Worst”
Doc Hamann and Bill Childers share the record of seven batters faced without retiring a single one. Harry Heitmann gave up hits to each of his four batters, while Mike Palagyi handed out four free passes (three walks and a hit by pitch).
Sadly, there’s only one pitcher on this list who surrendered a home run, and it’s Zack Weiss. Even worse, he gave up a pair of them. As it turns out, he’s the only pitcher in MLB history to give up two long balls without ever retiring a batter.
Knowledge can be painful. It hurts knowing that an actual currently living human being is arguably the worst MLB pitcher of all time. Not knowing anything more about Weiss than his pitching history, it’s hard not to root for him to get another crack at the majors. Life and baseball aren’t about fairness though, and sometimes one chance is all you get. If so, Weiss holds a dubious record that is only anesthetized by obscurity.
*An eleventh pitcher, Ed Coughlin of the 1884 Buffalo Something-or-others, faced five batters faced without getting an out, but somehow yielded only three baserunners. He’s not included on the list because apparently people couldn’t count very well in 1884.
