Jonathan Villar’s hitless streak and the abyss

Baseball is extremely difficult, and Jonathan Villar is proof of that. Granted, the game is clearly easier for him than it is for most anyone currently living on earth. At the age of 23, Villar has already spent parts of two seasons playing shortstop in the major leagues, albeit with the Astros. He is fast and skilled and young and improving. There is no way of knowing how good Jonathan Villar may someday be at baseball.

But we do have some sense of how difficult the game is for him at the moment. Villar has struck out 52 times in 180 plate appearances this season, which is only slightly more frequently than he did in 2013. He is very fast, but overall not especially efficient at stealing bases when he manages to get on base, which is itself a thing that has happened a little less than 30 percent of the time during his brief career. And when he is on base, Villar has proven that there is still a decent chance that he could quite literally kill himself by slamming his head into Brandon Phillips’ ass.

Anyway, this is all worth mentioning only because Jonathan Villar, between May 20 and May 30, went 26 at-bats without a hit. That’s a noteworthy dry spell, for the Astros and Villar and those (cough) who were counting on Villar to provide some stolen bases and more than one hit per fortnight in deeper fantasy baseball leagues.

It’s long enough, in fact, to raise the question of whether it might be bumping up against a historic ignominy. How many at-bats, really, can a major-league hitter go without a hit before we -- or, more to the point, that player’s employers -- no longer can call him a major-league hitter?

The answer, it turns out, is Slightly Longer Than Jonathan Villar Managed, But Not That Much Longer.

The longest hitless streak for a non-pitcher in the 1960s is an honor -- or, anyway, a thing -- that belongs to Gus Gil and Joe Keough, both of whom went 40 at-bats without a hit. Dave Campbell managed three more at-bats without a hit in 1973, which was the longest streak of the 1970s. Most decade-best/worst streaks are around this length. Len Matuszek and Joe Morgan’s 34 hitless at-bats were the longest streak of the 1980s, and Dann Howitt set the longest/worst/most of the 1990s with, again, 40 empty at-bats. (Pitchers are, of course, a different story. The legendary Doug Davis, in one six year span during the last decade, had hitless streaks of both 51 and 50 at-bats.)

The lesson would seem to be that it’s difficult for any big-league hitter to go much more than 40 or so at-bats without getting hit. This could be because something eventually falls in or slips through, or because at-bats simply cease to become available as those at-bats continue to come up empty. And while very few good big leaguers have managed super-long hitless streaks, plenty of good players have endured Villar-ishly long stretches without a hit.

Bill Mazeroski is in the Hall of Fame, and went 28 at-bats without a hit, albeit in his last and worst season in the bigs; Joe Morgan is arguably the greatest second baseman in the game’s history, and also did what he did. Clete Boyer went a whopping 37 at-bats without a hit in 1969, and still was worth nearly three wins above replacement for a 93-win team. (Boyer won the Gold Glove that year, but an even 40 plate appearances without a hit is an even 40 plate appearances without a hit.) Paul O’Neill went 27 at-bats without a hit as a 24-year-old in 1987, and Cliff Floyd suffered a similar drought at 22. Robin Ventura was that age when he went 39 at-bats without a hit in his first full big league season.

This takes nothing away from Eugenio Velez’s astonishing, record-setting -- and technically ongoing! -- 46-at-bat hitless streak, which is the longest of this millenium. Those 34 big league games without a hit are an anti-achievement that no one can take away from Eugenio Velez, should someone for some reason attempt to do that.

But it is also easy to understand why Velez hasn’t had the chance to either end or extend his streak since 2011. It is harder to understand how Gus Gil, who posted an OPS+ of 5 during his 107 plate appearances in 1967, went on to receive 431 more during his career, but baseball is not an easy game to understand. Jonathan Villar, again, could tell you as much.

Still, there seems to be some broader baseball truth borne out by all this goofy suffering, just as there is something to the seemingly perverse baseball bromide that a pitcher Needs To Be Pretty Good To Lose 20 Games. Villar is good enough to earn his next 0-fer, and also bad enough to go 26 at-bats without a hit, and then take an 0-for-4 the day after breaking that streak. Villar is an Astro, yes -- he is Extremely Astros, arguably the Astros’ Astro -- but he’s not really an outlier.

He is, instead, a talented young person playing an extremely difficult game. Villar was unlucky, in a way, that the people who care about the game pay close enough attention to it to note the specifics of how he has failed. He is lucky -- in a bunch of ways, genetic and contextual and otherwise -- to have the chance to make all this a footnote in the course of his career. It’s just barely June, and there is a lot of baseball left, in every possible sense.