The Loneliest Job

Pinch hitting is the loneliest job in baseball. You sit for two and a half hours, cold, watching a game you are not playing in, and then somebody says your name and you have one swing to justify the whole afternoon. Most men are terrible at it. Gates Brown was the best who ever did it in the American League.

He retired with 107 career pinch hits, a record that still stands. In 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, when the league hit .230 and Bob Gibson posted an ERA of 1.12, Brown hit .370. Off the bench. In a season where nobody could hit anything, the man who almost never got to swing hit better than everyone.

He got there by an unlikely road. The Tigers signed him while he was serving time in an Ohio reformatory, and when people asked him later what he studied in school, he'd say he took a little English, a little math, some science, a few hubcaps, and some wheel covers. He never ran from any of it. He spent all thirteen of his seasons in Detroit, won a ring as a player in 1968 and another as a hitting coach in 1984, and stayed a favorite of that city until the day he died.

The details of stories like this one shift a little with every telling. Nobody has ever nailed down the date. But the reason it survives is that everyone who knew Gator says it sounds exactly like him, and a man who could hit .370 off the bench in 1968 has earned the right to have his legend outrun the box score.