Best contact hitters

Tony Gwynn’s skill was evident from the start. He lined a pair of hits for the Padres in his 1982 big-league debut. The opposing first baseman was Pete Rose of the Phillies.

“I thought, boy, wouldn’t it be great to have a career like his, to be able to do some of the things that he was able to do,” Gwynn recalled.

That, of course, is exactly what he did. Gwynn couldn’t match Rose’s 4,256 hits — nobody ever has — but he did qualify for the elite 3,000-hit club (with 141 to spare) while batting .338, the best career average in the Modern Era (1961 to the present).

“There isn’t a pitcher in the league who wants Tony Gwynn up with a runner on third base,” said one of his hitting coaches, Deacon Jones. “You know he’ll make contact.”

He was right about that. Gwynn whiffed just 434 times in 20 years. His worst single-season strikeout total was 40 in 1988. That’s a normal month for some present-day sluggers.

The result was an astronomically high contact rate (CT) of .953 for Gwynn’s career, reflecting the percentage of his at-bats that did not end in strikeouts. Nobody in the Modern Era was better in putting the bat on the ball.

Scroll below to see a rundown of the era’s 25 best contact hitters. My list is confined to players who made at least 8,000 plate appearances, and it excludes any action prior to 1961. (The latter rule eliminates the first portions of the careers of Luis Aparicio and Brooks Robinson.)

I’ve included detailed summaries for the top 10 contact hitters, including their ratios of strikeouts to at-bats, as well as their numbers of plate appearances and hits, and their career batting averages. They’re followed by a quick glance at the CTs for the next 15 players.

These 25 contact artists, taken as a group, were three and a half times more likely to produce a base hit than to take a third strike. Their collective totals: 62,358 hits against just 18,078 strikeouts.

Compare their exalted CTs to the single-year figures in 2021’s free-swinging atmosphere. Two batters — only two! — posted contact rates higher than .900 in more than 500 plate appearances last season: Kevin Newman of the Pirates (.921) and David Fletcher of the Angels (.904). Newman’s rate, impressive though it was, still trailed Gwynn’s 20-year CT by the sizable margin of 32 percentage points.

How times have changed.