Craig Kimbrel, Jorge Bonfiacio, and the Most Unlikely Single
It’s February now. On the baseball calendar, that means it’s just about prediction season. Everywhere you look on the baseball Internet, writers project which teams will win the division, who will collect all the major awards, and lots of other unknowables.
We’ll all be wrong, of course. Not only will we be wrong, but we know we’re going to be wrong and we do it anyway.Even worse, by the time the season ends and we find out how woefully wrong we are, nobody cares anymore! So what do we do then? We make playoff predictions! After that, it’ll be free agency predictions! It never ends.
We’re not going to stop; not ever. That’s why it’s helpful remember the eminent unpredictability of this game.
Craig Kimbrel
Craig Kimbrel is one of the absolute greatest throwers of a baseball in history. He’s the only reliever you could sort of argue is better than Mariano Rivera (No you can’t; that’s stupid. Long live Mo.) There are any number of stats that illustrate this point. Here’s one of them:
| All Time H/9 Leaders (min. 500IP) | H/9 |
| Craig Kimbrel | 4.82 |
| Kenley Jansen | 5.64 |
| Billy Wagner | 5.99 |
| Carlos Marmol | 6.01 |
| Troy Percival | 6.08 |
The gap between Kimbrel and Jansen is larger than the gap between Wagner and 17th place Francisco Rodriguez. This concludes the “Remember some cool relievers?” portion of the article.
The point is, a batter facing Kimbrel has much less chance of getting a hit than he would against any other pitcher in history, and it’s not even close. This held true in 2018 as well. Only 31 the 247 batters he faced earned a hit (4.5 H/9). 13 of them were singles, nine doubles, two triples, and seven home runs.
It’s the ordinary old singles that matter for our purposes. Among pitchers who threw at least 50 innings last year, Kimbrel allowed the lowest percentage of one-base hits.
| Pitcher | 1B% |
| Craig Kimbrel | 5.26% |
| Josh Hader | 6.21% |
| Jose Leclerc | 6.28% |
| Aroldis Chapman | 6.60% |
Jorge Bonifacio
Here’s where Jorge Bonifacio comes in. The Royals outfielder is quite a bit less renowned than Kimbrel. He’s not a bad player by any means; he’s a major leaguer after all! He’s just never earned the hype that his brother did back in 2012 (or 2014). But he’s not on top of any leaderboards, either.
Last year, Bonifacio hit just .225/.312/.360. He collected only 53 hits in 270 plate appearances, with a few too many strikeouts (71 of them, a 26.3 K%). He’s an all-or-nothing hitter, and there was too much nothing and not enough all in 2018.
Last year, 31 of Bonifacio’s hits were singles (11.48% of his plate appearances). That’s not nearly as low as Joey Gallo‘s league-worst 6.59%, but it’s not too far from the bottom. He was 60th lowest out of 337 batters with 200 plate appearances.
Jose Altuve vs. Alex Claudio
There are several possible outcomes for any given plate appearance. Everything from strikeouts to homers, ground balls, fly balls, catcher’s interference- it’s all on the table. However, some are more likely than others.
Even when a great hitter faces a hittable pitcher, such as Jose Altuve against Alex Claudio, predicting a single is foolish. Altuve hit .316 last year, meaning he failed to get a hit 68.4% of the time. Claudio surrendered a .329 batting average against in 2018, and so 67.1% of hitters did not earn a hit.
In this nearly ideal scenario for a single, it’s still far more likely not to happen. Nevertheless, baseball does occasionally make sense.
Altuve and Claudio faced each other just once at the beginning of the 2018 season. On April 1, Claudio threw four changeups, none of which exceeded 70 MPH. With a 1-2 count, Altuve slapped the fourth one into right field for a single.
If you were ever going to predict a single in a one-plate appearance sample, Altuve vs. Claudio would be the one to choose. Sometimes, it just happens to work out. On the other hand…
Jorge Bonifacio vs. Craig Kimbrel
Like Altuve vs. Claudio, Bonifacio and Kimbrel faced each other just one time. However, the circumstances couldn’t have been more different.
Kimbrel is the most difficult pitcher in baseball to single off of, certainly in 2018 and maybe ever. If you REALLY needed a single, Bonifacio wouldn’t be the batter to choose, especially against such an elite reliever.
They converged for a plate appearance on July 8. Kimbrel threw two blistering fastballs: a 97 MPH called
Needless to say, this tips the scales even further in Kimbrel’s favor. He reached 0-2 counts against 28 batters last year, striking out 18 of them. Just four reached base on one double and three singles.
Like any other hitter, Bonifacio struggles considerably more down 0-2. In 15 such plate appearances last year, he struck out six times, reaching base only three times on a double and two singles.
The fourth pitch was an 87 MPH curveball. Bonifacio, with all the odds against him, stroked a soft line drive into left field that fell at the feet of Andrew Benintenti for a base hit.
We Know Nothing
Nobody could reasonably expect Bonifacio to collect a hit in that situation.
This was the most impossible single of the 2018 season, and yet it happened anyway.
It didn’t matter much. Kimbrel struck out the next two batters to end the game, with Boston winning 7-4. It was just one of their 108 wins in the regular season, culminating in a championship. For Kansas City, it was merely one of their 104 losses. Only the Orioles finished with a worse record.
All the same, this was just one unpredictable event in a season full of unpredictable events. Sometimes, things turn out like Altuve vs. Claudio, but other times it’s Bonifacio vs. Kimbrel. Eventually, an unimaginably rare event does matter. It propels a team ahead or behind in the standings and alters the entire season.
Baseball never seems more certain than right before it begins. The Dodgers WILL win the NL West. Mike Trout WILL continue being a transcendent superstar. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. WILL be the Rookie of the Year.
Except sometimes these things that seem so inevitable just don’t pan out. Baseball is much too illogical, unexplainable, and random to make sense. While we all think we know what will happen, and never more so than this time of year, it’s important to remember that even Jorge Bonifacio singled off Craig Kimbrel on an 0-2 count.
