Hit By Pitch - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

• In the 1989 film Major League it was announced of fictional New York Yankees pitcher Duke Simpson: "The Duke led the American League this year in saves, ERA, and hit batsmen. This guy once threw at his own kid at a father-son game."
• Satirical newspaper The Onion ran a story entitled "Craig Biggio Blames Media Pressure For Stalling At 285 Hit-By-Pitches" as Biggio closed in on the record of 287 hit-by-pitches.
• In The Simpsons episode "Homer at the Bat", Homer Simpson is hit in the head by a pitch while playing for the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant softball team, rendering him unconscious, but forcing in the winning run.
• In Cheers, the slow-witted bartender known as "Coach" in one episode claimed to hold a minor league record for being hit by pitches. Being hit was a skill he cultivated, saying it was just as good as a hit.
• In Futurama, the future equivalent of baseball (blernsball) has Leela as the first female pitcher. She ends up hitting every batter at the plate (or "beaning" them) and goes down as the worst pitcher in history.
• In both versions of the movie Bad News Bears, coach Buttermaker makes use of several unorthodox tactics during the season final. One of them is instructing one of his players (Rudi Stein in the 1976 original and Daragabrigadien in the remake) to get hit on purpose in order to load the bases, knowing he has a very good batter coming up next (Engelberg and Leak, respectively).
• In Major, the protagonist's father, Shigeharu Honda, is hit in the head by a pitch during a major league match. Although he manages to revive and finish the game, he dies next morning from internal bleeding in the skull, leaving his son an orphan.