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FORGOTTEN HISTORY:
THE CURIOUS CASE OF HENRY HATCH, THE MAN WITH -23 CAREER WAR

For much of the late 1880s and the entirety of the 1890s, the Binghamton Blue Jays were a highly competitive team in both the latter days of the single-competition National Base Ball Organization and the early days of the Northeastern League. From 1888 to 1890 they won three straight Upstate New York titles, and they were over .500 seven out of ten seasons in the ‘90s (1890: 75-38).

The club's longstanding run of competency to end the century made many forget just how bad things were for the club as it was trying to find its way in the 1870s - back then as Binghamton B.B.C. - after organized baseball split into the APBL and the NBBO. One would think that dominant clubs exiting the NBBO would have made things easier for Binghamton, but by the middle of the 1870s they were the worst team in the history of the sport.

Their win-loss marks in 1873 and ’74 were pro & semi-pro records for futility that are likely to stand forever.

Coinciding with that seemingly impossible stretch of terrible baseball was the seven-year career of one of the sport’s most infamous players: Henry “Brick Hands” Hatch. On a team that was easily the worst in the competitive version of the game Hatch was singled out as Binghamton’s most ineffective player, one who baffled spectators due to the fact that he continued to start every single game at shortstop year after year.

Even using modern, advanced metrics the man’s place in baseball infamy holds up as one that was well-earned:

In the encyclopedia of 1800s baseball, nobody – hurler or batsman – came remotely close to Hatch’s amount of negative WAR, especially his rate of -7.7 WAR per 162 games. How was Hatch that bad? In the case of someone who played that poorly for that long, a closer examination is most definitely needed…

Could Henry Hatch hit? Not really. He had an OPS above .700 in one of his seven seasons: a .714 (OPS+: 112) during an 1872 season in which he still earned a WAR of -2.7. For his career, Hatch had an OPS of .628 and an OPS+ of 84. When he started every game for the record-setting – not in good ways – 8-62 Binghamton squad in 1874 Hatch put up an average of .214 and an OPS of .481 (OPS+: 42).

Could Henry Hatch run? No. Over the course of his career Hatch stole 22 bases and was caught 16 times. He never stole more than eight bases in a season, and in the days when teams could score 8-9 runs per game Hatch scored 60+ runs in a 70-game season once (Career UBR Base Running Value: -5.6).

Could Henry Hatch field? ABSOLUTELY NOT, and this was where he earned his nickname: Brick Hands. Hatch was said to have average range (Infield Range: 106/250) and an okay arm (Infield Arm: 120/250). However, his propensity for errors relative to his peers (Infield Error: 79/250) at a time when players basically wore leather factory work gloves to field the ball meant he was catastrophic at shortstop:

Hatch's career fielding percentage of .625 meant that if he was given eight chances to do something with the ball at shortstop he would complete the job successfully five times and screw it up the other three.

Even in an era when teams could average 5+ errors per game and not-infrequently soar into double-digit levels of fielding mistakes over the course of an afternoon, Hatch’s ineptitude in the middle of the infield stood alone. Nobody else who played second base or shortstop in the early days of baseball ventured anywhere near his failure rate. Hatch's 177 errors in 1871, over just 70 games (2.53 errors per game), should surely stand the test of time as the most gaffe-strewn campaign ever seen. On top of that, Hatch’s consistently awful fielding became a bit of a perverse spectacle, as he wasn’t just the worst-fielding shortstop in the 48-team NBBO but he was the worst for seven straight seasons.

Hatch’s obvious inability to field his position, while also not doing anything else all that well, led some to posit conspiracy theories about him. Did Hatch help bankroll Binghamton operations, and thus pay for his place in the team? Did he have compromising information on the club’s chairman and/or multiple teammates? Was he that wonderful to have around that the team just couldn’t do without his presence in the starting lineup? Was Hatch secretly a comedian or a performance artist, aiming to amuse people with his play?

Remarked one columnist who ventured from New York City to watch the man in person:

"Imagine a bald eagle soaring through the most azure of summer skies. That awe-inspiring symbol of the United States of America, with its wings spread from tip to tip, its eyes surveying the landscape below, and its talons outstretched in preparation to catch that afternoon's bounty. The sight would surely cause a man to marvel. That majestic flying specimen has no earthly clue how to field a batted ball, and apparently neither does Henry Hatch of the Binghamton Base Ball Club."

No matter the actual reason, Henry Hatch started all 490 of Binghamton’s games from 1869 to 1875 while putting up a cumulative WAR of -23.3, and for better or worse the baseball universe was made more interesting because of it.