Jeff Mathis May Well Be One Of The Worst Hitters Of All Time

There may be no cushier job in professional athletics than backup catcher. A backup catcher gets most days off, is rarely expected to hit at a competent level, and still makes a professional athlete’s salary. Pretty nice gig, if you can get it.

But in the annals of light-hitting backstops, the king of them all may be the Angels’ Jeff Mathis, a 27-year-old righty who is, by any available metric, one of the worst regular hitters the sport has ever seen. That is not an exaggeration. Our Angels blog, Halos Heaven, has the scoop on Mathis’ misadventures at the plate:

Jeff Mathis has now accumulated 1022 plate appearances in his major league career, quite a few for a non-pitcher with his, um, batting “issues.” Sure there have been worse hitters around, but almost all of them get fired before they can do too much damage. Where does Mathis’s offensive ineptitude stand on the list of the all-time worst career performances by batters with more than 1000 PAs?

.200 AVG: 7th worst in the history of baseball

.267 OBP: 51st worst in the history of baseball

53 OPS+: 33rd worst in the history of baseball

Oh, but it gets worse. As you probably expected, Mathis’ company in those lists includes plenty of players from different periods of baseball history, like the dead ball era and the essentially lawless pre-Black Sox era. In fact, as Halos Heaven goes on to mention, among batters with at least 1,000 plate appearances, Mathis is dead last in the post-strike era in batting average, OBP, OPS, and (obviously) OPS+. His slugging percentage is 13th worst in baseball during the same span, and we’re assuming the top 12 are just different spellings of “Willy Taveras.”

The minimum number of plate appearances is important; not only does it remove the influence of small sample sizes, but it establishes a level of effect on a ballclub. If a guy goes 3-23 during a cup of coffee in the bigs while a starter’s on DL, after all, little harm is done in the long run. It’s no worse than a good hitter undergoing a bit of a slump. Spreading that awful performance over 1,000 plate appearances, however, has an undeniably negative effect on the team’s season as a whole; those are hundreds and hundreds of outs the team can never get back.

Now, the fact that Mathis has stuck with the Angels for this long means he does provide some value to the team, and manager (and former catcher) Mike Scioscia holds Mathis in unusually high regard. So Mathis’ contributions are the type that don’t show up in the stat sheets. Are. they. ever.