Major League Baseball

The college baseball team shattering HBP records is playing for the D-III World Series

Updated Jun. 1, 2023 2:10 p.m. ET

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Jake Mintz

FOX Sports MLB Analyst

A college baseball team that you’ve never watched at a school that you’ve never heard of is outsmarting the competition and rethinking the sport with a painfully simple and simply painful concept: If you are in the batter's box and the pitch is coming at you... Do. Not. Move. 

Welcome to HBP-U.

In 2022, the New York Mets broke the modern MLB record for most hit-by-pitches in a season, accumulating 114 plunkings in 165 total games, their brief postseason run included. That’s 0.69 HBPs per game.

This spring, the Division-III Misericordia University Cougars were hit 153 times in 52 games for an eye-popping rate of 2.94 hit batters per game, an all-time NCAA record. They have ridden that avalanche of beanballs all the way to the D-III World Series, where they will take on No. 1 overall seed Johns Hopkins on Friday afternoon. 

No baseball team, college or above, in the entire history of the sport, has ever been hit this often.

Since 2014, the Cougars have averaged 111 HBPs per season. These student-athletes are not soldiers of fortune or accidental baseball magnets, but rather, practitioners of patience and pain. Their monk-like approach is part of a unified and effective strategy designed to win ballgames. Misericordia wants you to hit them, again and again and again, until they score enough runs, steal enough bases, bunt enough runners over and beat you.

[Read more from Jake Mintz: Reds' Elly De La Cruz is MLB's top prospect and a unicorn, and he’s almost here]

"Some of these guys will stand there, not move and take one off the ribs like a f***ing maniac." Explained Dante Salerno, a current D-III assistant and former Misericordia outfielder.

"When you get hit by a pitch, in that program," said Jeremy DeCoutiis a 2017 graduate and the all-time program leader in HBPs. "There are 30 plus guys on the bench going absolutely apes*** for you."

"DeCoutiis?" Said Kyle Lindsay, a former Misericordia player and assistant coach, who is now the head man at Ursinus College. "He just didn’t move, man. It would be coming in and he would just let it hit him, not move a muscle, not flinch. The whole dugout would be in awe. He was a tough son of a bitch."

But how? How did a small catholic liberal-arts school outside of Scranton, PA. become the hit-by-pitch capital of the baseball world?

If you ask Head Coach Pete Egbert, he’ll tell you that, like a hit-by-pitch, it was mostly by accident.

Egbert has helmed the Misericordia baseball program since 2007, but it wasn’t until around 2011 that "staying in there" even crossed his mind as an actual strategy. That fall, a graduate assistant new to the program named Andrew Bennett noted to Egbert that a lot of his team's players were consistently jumping out of the way of pitches.

"He said ‘what happens if they... just don’t get out of the way anymore.’" Egbert told FOX Sports. "So we introduced that to the program, the kids bought into it, our on-base percentages went way up and now it’s something that our whole team takes a lot of pride in. It’s taken on a whole new meaning for us, year after year."

Like other revolutionaries across the small college sports world, like the basketball programs who only shoot three-pointers, or the football teams who never punt, Egbert and Co. eventually began recruiting for their unique system. They want kids in the grit-and-grind small-ball mold: overlooked, undersized athletes who can make contact, wreak havoc on the basepaths and aren’t afraid of getting plunked. 

"It really is a part of the recruiting process." admitted Kyle Lindsay, a former Misericordia player and assistant coach, who is now the head man at Ursinus College. "It’s an identity. It’s not a perfect science. But if you look at the roster, it’s full of 5-8, 165-pound, hard-nosed kids who can flat-out run."

Once the recruits get on campus and buy into the take-one-for-the-team approach, that’s when the real work begins.

"I can remember multiple instances, whether it’s batting practice, cage work, scrimmages, whatever" DeCoutiis recounted. "Where if you move out of the way, you are going to lose your at-bat. And if you [avoid a pitch] in a game, you’ll have 30+ guys on your own team chirping at you."

Other folks around the team spoke of a reward system for hit-by-pitches in practice where the plunkees were granted extra swings in the cage. There are tales of teammates competing with one another to get the most free bases, wagering cases of beer and bragging rights. Alumni tell stories of iconic plunkings — ask DeCoutiis about the time a ball ricocheted off his leg and over the backstop — and talk about hit-by-pitch takers like heroes. 

"There’s a safety component to it too." Lindsay noted about practicing getting hit. "You don’t wanna be welting guys up during the week, but there are some safe ways to do it with tennis balls and stuff."

Injuries are obviously a constant risk, the glaring downside to Misericordia’s pacifist strategy. Former players and coaches contend that the program drills the correct way to get hit, akin to a boxer learning how to take a punch. Getting hit in a bone is a lot more dangerous than getting hit in the fleshy part of your butt or shoulder.

One former player remembered the general safety rules: You can dodge anything near your head without the fear of scorn or repercussion, and if you’re a fast player who is a base-stealing threat, you can dodge anything at your feet. Beyond that, if the ball is coming at you, it’s statue time — that is, if you want to keep your starting spot.

Now, it’s important to note that the Cougars are not gratuitously leaning into pitches or distracting pitchers like baseball matadors. They are simply not evading or avoiding pitches thrown at them. And when you consider that many small college pitchers (1) struggle to locate consistently on the inner third of the plate and (2) aren’t always the most emotionally grounded on the mound, it’s a strategy that makes a ton of sense.

"It’s interesting what it does to opposing pitchers." Egbert explained "It gets them out of character. They know that this is a part of our game so it impacts their game, what pitches they throw, how they hold runners, where they try to locate, their rhythm."

Because many of their players are relatively short in stature, they tend to have shorter arms, which in turn, means many of their players stand close to the plate in order to reach pitches away. That also, obviously, makes them much more susceptible to plunkings. And nobody on the current roster embodies that dynamic more than Garrett McIlhenney, a lefty-hitting 5-5 outfielder who has a .404 average and 41 steals, but also leads the country with 30 HBPs and a .598 (!!!) on base percentage.

"We hit that McIlhenny kid seven times this year in six games." Said Arcadia University head coach Bryan Torresani, a conference-mate of the Cougars, who took five of six from Misericordia during this regular season. "For me, I’ve learned to understand that if we’re going to play them, we’re going to plunk them a couple times."

One might think this intrepid strategy would rub some D-III coaches the wrong way, that some colleagues and opponents could see Misericordia’s approach as "cheap" or "bush league." Quite the opposite. Talk to most coaches about Egbert’s program and they will respond, both on and off the record, with respect and admiration.

"Nobody sees it as bush league because they do it by the book." Torresani said. "Egbert just does a good job of getting his kids to never move out of the way. They feast on fear."

"When you play [Misericordia], it’s very clear that [Egbert] has a system and he has players that fit the system." Said Jonas Fester, the head coach of Lebanon Valley College. "He’s deliberate, he’s serious, he’s thoughtful, he’s professional. And when you play them you can’t even really tell that they lead the country [in HBPs]. It’s not obvious. It’s just like they have tractor beams on them. They are death by a thousand papercuts."

What is perhaps most impressive about this beanball parade, this record-setting hailstorm of plunkings, is how it actualizes the hard-to-pin-down clichés of college athletics. Every half-decent athletic program champions team spirit, a gritty identity and a hard-working attitude. Often there’s legitimacy to that, often it’s just eyewash and sports-speak. But almost always, it’s nebulous and hard to actually understand.

Not at Misericordia. They are a team committed, wholeheartedly, to standing in there and racking up bruises for the sake of a larger goal. It is both admirable and outrageous, commendable and unhinged. But one thing is for certain, nothing is changing anytime soon.

Jake Mintz, the louder half of @CespedesBBQ is a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He played college baseball, poorly at first, then very well, very briefly. Jake lives in New York City where he coaches Little League and rides his bike, sometimes at the same time. Follow him on Twitter at @Jake_Mintz.

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