Great Hitters—but not so good at anything else

Kind of building on my earlier post about guys who were good at everything, I decided to search for guys who could hit the ball—but kinda stunk at every other aspect of the game. The search criteria was:

• greater than 100 Batting Runs
• less than 0 Baserunning, Avoiding Double Play, and Total Zone Runs
• less than or equal to 0 Infield Double Play, Outfield Arm, or Catching Runs

I kept guys who played premium positions (positional adjustment greater than zero) on the list since this was more about individual skills than overall value. Plus, I found it interesting to see some catchers ranking highly.

Here is the list (numbers from Rally's WAR database):

TotalNeg is the combined total of everything besides Batting Runs and Positional Adjustment. We range from just barely below average (Travis Hafner's total is just -9) to greatly below average (Bobby Bonilla comes in at a whopping -135).

Ted Simmons (70), Ken Caminiti (11), and Mickey Tettleton (3) are the three players who have positive position value. Caminti has the closest TotalNeg (-17) to average of this trio, so he probably least deserves to be on this list. Simmons (-73 TotalNeg) and Tettleton (-75 TotalNeg) certainly deserve it.

Ordonez, Hafner, and Fielder are the active players who make it. If you, like I did, wonder how David Ortiz missed the list, it's because he entered 2010 with a DP of exactly zero. Baseball-Reference still has him at 0 for 2010 so far, so he's still toeing the line.

Personally, I find this kind of simple search interesting. Anything else in particular you'd like to see?