This particular rabbit-hole was first encountered after the series against the Athletics. Ildemaro Vargas had a walk-off hit in Tuesday’s game during that series, and then ended up closing out (if not closing) Wednesday’s game from the mound, being called on to pitch with a 12-run lead. Has that ever happened before? Has anyone got a walk-off hit one day, and then pitched the very next? There’s no easy way to find out, and my Tweets at the Elias Sports Bureau – who probably could check – went unanswered.
So I had to dig into the question the hard way, and see if I could find any previous examples.
The obvious candidates are Babe Ruth and Shohei Ohtani. According to Baseball Reference, Ruth was credited with sixteen walk-off hits in his career. But as a pitcher, he only really was a regular from 1915-1919, with just nine major-league appearances on the mound outside those years. Ruth’s first walk-off wasn’t until 1918, severely cutting down the odds. Still, I chugged through the record books, and found a couple of close cases in 1919. He did the reverse: Ruth closed out a Red Sox win on July 30, and the following day had a walk-off hit in the 12th inning. And on September 20, the Babe started the game, moved to left in the sixth and had a walk-off HR off Lefty Williams in the 9th. But he didn’t pull a Vargas.
Ohtani was considerably simpler. Over his career, he has four walk-off hits. September 2020 (didn’t pitch after August 2nd); two in 2024 (didn’t pitch at all that year); and April 2o25 (didn’t start pitching until mid-June). So, not even close there. However, these are definitely not the only two pitchers to have recorded walk-off hits. You might think that would be extremely rare. And, to be honest, in the present day it is. Hasn’t happened for more than twenty years, and it likely never will again. The Manfred Man rule means marathon games are no more, so teams are unlikely to run out of position players, and have to let a pitcher hit.
Even the famous Ryne Nelson hit was as a PH, not a pitcher. Actual plate-appearances by pitchers, while not entirely extinct, are now incredibly rare. In the 2021 season, the last before the DH came to the National League, there were 4,829 of them. That number has been reduced by over 99%, with the average for 2022-25 being just 38 PA. They’re almost inevitably in blowouts, with a manager happy to give up an at-bat to get another inning from his reliever. Of 35 pitcher trips to the plate this year, none have been with a margin of less then eight runs. They have got four hits – but three were by position players like Vargas.
Most notable of those: Brett Sullivan’s HR while pitching for Colorado, and that came off another position player, Miguel Rojas! The only “true” pitcher to get a hit this year was Victor Mederos of the Braves, who drove in two runs with a single. He came into the game after seven innings with a 12-0 lead, in a triple switch which cost Atlanta the DH. Mederos then reached the plate with two outs in the eighth, and drove in a pair (below). Let’s quietly forget that it came off the Texas Rangers’ catcher, Kyle Higashioka. Instead, we’ll just revel in Victor becoming the 124th member of the “Career 1.000 BA Club”, a distinction he’s not likely to lose anytime soon.
[Side note: Ohtani hit a home-run on May 20th, leading off the game in San Diego before taking the mound in the bottom half of the inning. However, the box-score firmly records him in the batting order as a designated hitter, and so that doesn’t count as a pitcher HR]
But I did decide to look at pitchers who recorded walk-off hits, and see if any of them might have pitched the following day as well. Baseball Reference has play-by-play data going back to 1910, and they have 218 examples of pitchers with walk-off hits. Probably more than I’d have thought. Inevitably, the majority are in the early days of baseball, when complete games by starting pitchers were the standard, not a rare exception. In 1910, for instance, Walter Johnson made 42 starts, and finished 38 games. That certainly given your starter a shot at coming to the plate late. They could also hit better than recent pitchers. In 1921, they had a .521 OPS, compared to .293 in 2021.
Browsing the list makes for a fun wander through baseball history. People like Bullet Joe Bush, who had more walkoff hits (4) than any other pitcher, and is sometimes credited with inventing the forkball. Or knuckleballer Mickey Haefner, who performed the feat twice in eleven days during the 1945 season, but is best known for hitting Ted Williams in an exhibition game. Or Hall of Famer Red Ruffing, who on April 14th, 1933 made the ultimate statement, by hitting the only recorded walk-off grand-slam by a pitcher in major-league history. [Clay Bryant had a 1937 go-ahead slam in the 10th inning, but that was the top of the frame]
49 of these instances happened from 1910-19: in the live-ball era, there was one fewer the following decade, then fifty in the 1930’s. But they happened less frequently thereafter, and became perilously rare after the sixties, as teams would pinch-hit for their pitchers more often. There have been just eleven walk-off hits by a pitcher since the end of 1969, and one in the past thirty years. That belongs to Randy Keisler of the Reds on May 24, 2005 [though there have since been pinch-hitting pitchers to do it, such as Michael Lorenzen, who walked off against the D-backs in 2019]. He got the knock as his first career hit: Keisler said, “I was so excited that I swung at the first pitch, and it was 2 feet off the plate.”
Anyway, returning to the original topic. Has any of these players pitched the following night? I figure it was more likely to be a recent pitcher – a reliever. Iron-armed though the starters of yore were, they still weren’t going back to the mound on consecutive games. So I began with Keisler, and manually started tracking their pitching logs, to see if any threw the next night. Keisler did get the next night off, before pitching on May 26 – so close, but no cigar. Before him, Mike Stanton in 1994: he pitched four innings for Atlanta, in a game where the Braves scored seven in the ninth to force extras. He went 2-for-2 on the night, but got a well-deserved week off after that.
I had to go back to 1957 to find a match for Vargas’s feat here. On September 5, Bob Grim of the Yankees came up with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and the game tied 2-2. The 1954 Rookie of the Year had just worked round a leadoff double in the top half of the inning, and there were two men on base. He promptly ended his own night with a three-run homer, as documented by our siblings over at Pinstripe Alley. The following night, down in Washington, he came in to another tied game and put up a zero in the eighth. But he walked the first three batters in the ninth and, though rebounding with a groundout and pop fly, a missed catch error at second ended the game and Grim took the loss.
Now, it is definitely possible that someone took the Ildemaro route. A position player getting a walk-off hit one day, then pitching the next. The problem is, there are a lot more walk-off hits for position players. 129 this year alone, to be precise. Even flipping the script and starting with position players pitching, we have seen that almost as often – 119 times in 2026 already, not including Ohtani. Digging through those is also more intensive, since you need to go through the player’s game log into the box-score to determine if they had a walk-off hit. Maybe I’ll put samath on the job there, see if he scrape that data!
