MLB Trade Rumors confirmed the news on July 17 that Ron Hunt had passed away, and it didn't take long for the tributes to start rolling in from people who actually watched him play. Hunt wasn't a slugger or a Hall of Famer in the traditional sense, but he carved out one of the strangest and most respected niches in baseball history: getting drilled by pitches on purpose, over and over, for over a decade.
Ron Hunt Passes Away t.co/LFMedfGabU
Hunt broke in with the Mets in 1963 and immediately made noise, finishing as runner-up to Pete Rose for National League Rookie of the Year. He became the first player in franchise history to start an All-Star Game, a distinction that still shows up in Mets trivia questions 6 decades later. He spent 4 seasons in Queens before bouncing to the Dodgers, Giants, and eventually Montreal, where his signature skill turned into full-blown legend.
That skill was getting hit. On purpose. Repeatedly. In 1971 with the Expos, Hunt took 50 hit-by-pitches in a single season, a modern-era record that still stands more than 50 years later. He finished his career with 243 total HBPs, a mark that stood as the post-dead-ball-era record for years. This wasn't an accident or bad luck, either. Hunt was famous for crowding the plate and refusing to bail out, treating a fastball to the ribs as just another way to get on base.
Ron Hunt, Mets legend famous for being hit by pitch 243 times in 12 year career (50 times in 1971 with Montreal), RIP. 85. In here: he once explained to @KenDavidoff how he worked at being hit
Jon Heyman's post is the kind of detail that makes the story stick: Hunt reportedly told Ken Davidoff that getting hit was something he actively worked at, not something that just happened to him. That's a different level of commitment than your average tough-out infielder, and it's why old-school baseball people still bring him up when the conversation turns to guys who'd do absolutely anything to help their team win a game.
For Mets fans specifically, Hunt matters because he was there at the very beginning, part of the early-60s teams that were building the foundation before the franchise had any real identity. Being the first player to start an All-Star Game for a franchise is a permanent footnote, the kind of thing that gets read off every time the team puts together a history reel. He wasn't a superstar by traditional measures, but he was a foundational piece of what the Mets became.
Baseball loses a little bit of its weirder, grittier history every time a guy like Hunt passes. There's nobody left in the modern game who'd willingly take 50 fastballs to the body in a season just to extend an inning, and that's probably for the best from a safety standpoint. But it also means a genuinely one-of-a-kind competitor is gone, and the record he set in 1971 is likely to sit untouched for a long, long time.