This MLB Hitter Will NOT Swing...And He Keeps Walking

Miguel Vargas, he will not swing the bat. I asked him today in the clubhouse, you swinging today? He said, nope. Three and one, and he has walked again. Go figure. So Miguel Vargas, infielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, has walked in half of his spring training at-bats, and he isn't even allowed to swing. He has a hairline fracture in his pinky, and he's not yet cleared to swing the bat, but he's still playing in big league spring training games. Teams know he isn't allowed to swing, but he's still walking. Now, I've personally never seen this before. Usually, if a player can't swing, but the team wants them to track pitches, which basically means just watch pitches go by to help train their eyes to pick up the pitch speed, location, and the spin, they do it on what's called the backfields. They have either minor league games going on, or they have just simulated at-bats, which means pitchers are throwing to hitters, but it's not a real game. But the Dodgers want Vargas to play some defense and get used to playing with Miguel Rojas, who will be taking over for Gavin Lux. So they're just having him not swing. Now, Zach Grinke, with the Royals, who likes to kind of mess around with everyone, messed around with Vargas, started throwing him 59-mile-an-hour EFIS pitches before blowing a 92-mile-an-hour fastball right down the middle. But the interesting part is that even though he isn't swinging, and teams know that he isn't swinging, he's still walking. Again, 50% of his at-bats so far. So keep this in mind the next time you're coaching your 12-year-old game and want to scream at your pitcher who's just walked another kid to just throw strikes. So this got me thinking about hitters not swing and how well they do if they just refuse to swing the bat, which brought me to the greatest hitter of all time, in my opinion, Barry Bonds. Now, I know a lot of people in the comments are going to say he took steroids, and that's fine. But Barry put together a stretch of the most ridiculous seasons I or anyone else has ever seen. So take a look at these numbers. This is just from 2004. This was during his crazy stretch. And this isn't even the year that he hit 73 home runs. But the numbers are absolutely crazy. He walked 232 times in a season. 120 of those walks were intentional walks. He hit .362. He had a .609 on-base percentage, which was by far the highest of all time. He had an .812 slugging percentage, and he had a 1,422 on-base plus slugging. That just sounds weird to say because you never really say numbers anywhere close to that high. So then this got me thinking, what if Barry Bonds never even swung the bat in 2004? We saw that he was intentionally walked 120 times. But what would his numbers be? What would his on-base percentage be during this season if he just decided, again, to not swing? And this season right here is probably the greatest season ever for an offensive player. So I started to look around, and I found this awesome YouTube video that basically does that. It goes through the 2004 season, and it figures out what Barry's on-base percentage would have been if he had never even swung the bat. He just stood there. He was Barry Bonds. He scared the ever-living you-know-what out of the opposing pitchers. But he never swung for the entire season. And his on-base percentage came out to be .608, which would have been the highest of all time behind his .609, which he actually had that season when he decided to swing the bat. Imagine that, a .608 on-base percentage if he literally just went to the plate, stood there, and never swung. So is Miguel Vargas the next Barry Bonds? We all know the answer to that is a big no. But it's still fun to watch major leaguers walk a guy over and over again when they know he literally isn't going to swing the bat. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below. Let me know if Barry Bonds is the greatest hitter of all time. I still say he is. I know a lot of people are going to yell at me, but he was just ridiculous. I've never seen it in my life. I know I'm not that old. I didn't get to see a lot of great hitters play. But I've never seen anything like Barry. It was video game-like. It was better than video game-like. I can't even hit that well in video games. That's all we got. Put it in the comments section below. We'll talk to you later.