Some guys play baseball. Ron Hunt survived it.
Hunt, a two-time All-Star second baseman whose 12-year major league career spanned five National League franchises, died at 85. He had been in hospice care in St. Louis, suffering from multiple illnesses, according to Mets historian Jay Horwitz, who paid tribute to Hunt earlier this month on a team webpage.
“No one played the game harder than Ron Hunt our first All-Star,” Horwitz wrote.
That’s the kind of quote you don’t need to dress up. The film doesn’t lie.
Hunt broke in with the newborn New York Mets in 1963 and immediately made the expansion club look less like a punchline. He hit .272 with 10 homers and finished runner-up to Pete Rose for NL Rookie of the Year — losing to a guy who’d go on to collect more hits than anyone in history, so no shame there. The next summer, Hunt batted .303 and became the first Met ever to start an All-Star Game, drawing the assignment at Shea Stadium in front of the home crowd. He finished 25th in MVP voting that year, which sounds low until you remember the Mets lost 109 games.
The Dodgers acquired Hunt for the 1967 season. He played 110 games in Los Angeles, slashing .263/.344/.345 — serviceable, not spectacular, the kind of line a coach respects because it means a guy got on base and didn’t give away at-bats. Then he moved on to San Francisco, where he put up the best WAR seasons of his career: 4.6 in 1968 and 4.1 in 1969, finishing 15th in MVP voting that latter year.
But Montreal is where Hunt carved his name into the record book.
In 1971, his first full season with the Expos, Hunt was hit by a pitch 50 times. Fifty. That’s the modern-era single-season record, a mark that still stands and falls just one shy of Hughie Jennings’ all-time record of 51, set in 1896 when the mound was five feet closer and pitchers threw like they had a personal grudge. Hunt’s .402 on-base percentage that season was built on 58 walks and those 50 plunkings — 108 free trips to first base from a man who refused to back off the plate. He posted a 5.1 WAR and earned induction into the Montreal Expos Hall of Fame.
Over his career, Hunt was hit by pitches 243 times. He drew 555 walks. He struck out only 382 times in over 5,200 at-bats. You want a contact hitter who crowded the dish like a steer pressing against a fence rail? That’s Hunt. He finished his career with a brief 12-game stint with his hometown St. Louis Cardinals in 1974.
Across 12 seasons, Hunt compiled a .272 batting average, a .368 on-base percentage, and 32.7 WAR — numbers that won’t land him in Cooperstown but tell the story of a player who found every possible way to get on base and never once made it easy on the opposition.
Len Hochberg of MLB.com, who reported Hunt’s death, called him “the combative second baseman.” That word — combative — fits a man who leaned into fastballs for a living better than any stat line ever could.
Hunt is survived by his family. The Mets organization, which had been monitoring his health in recent weeks, remembered him as the player who gave the franchise its first legitimate big leaguer.
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