St. Louis Cardinals Matt Carpenter avoids grounding into double plays

Over the course of the 2018 campaign, St. Louis Cardinals infielder Matt Carpenter made history by not grounding into a double play.

Double plays are just a part of the game. Over the course of the year, every player who qualifies for the batting title grounds into a double play. It is just one of those things that are seemingly impossible to avoid. Even the fastest runners get doubled up at times, with a ball hit hard enough right at an infielder.

However, someone forgot to tell that to St. Louis Cardinals infielder Matt Carpenter. Over the course of his 677 plate appearances in 2018, Carpenter did not ground into a single double play. It is not as though Carpenter is a speedster, as he has never stolen more than five bases in a season. However, he was one of the poster children for the Fly Ball Revolution, with a nearly three to one fly ball to ground ball ratio last year. His ground ball percentage was the sixth lowest in MLB history, based on the statistics that are available.

Carpenter also had plenty of opportunity to hit into a double play. Over the course of the past season, he had 91 plate appearances where a runner was on first with less than two out. 31 of those plate appearances ended in a walk or strikeout, so he only had 60 plate appearances where he put the ball in play.

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If we extrapolate his ground ball percentage to those plate appearances, he would have had approximately 16 ground balls in a potential double play situation. And yet, Carpenter failed to hit into a twin killing in any of those times, an impressive feat for someone not exactly fleet of foot.

In avoiding the double play, he became the tenth player in major league history to go a complete season without grounding into a double play. He joined Augie Galan, Pete Reiser, Dick McAulliffe, Rob Deer, Otis Nixon, Ray Lankford, Rickey Henderson, Craig Biggio, and Chase Utley on that distinctive list. Interestingly enough, five of those players came from the 1990s, with three (Nixon, Lankford, and Henderson) performing that feat in 1994.

While most of the players on this list had, at worst, a decent amount of speed, Carpenter is not the only anomaly to not ground into a double play. Rob Deer was not exactly a speedster himself, making the fact that he did not ground into a double play in any of his 511 plate appearances in 1990 quite impressive. Of course, he also struck out 147 times and drew 64 walks over the season, so he was not putting the ball in play very often.

Matt Carpenter made baseball history last season. The St. Louis Cardinals infielder was just the tenth player in major league history not to ground into a double play over a full season.