By the end of the 1971 season, National League pitchers had hit Ron Hunt with a pitch fifty times, a modern-era single-season record that still stands more than half a century later. Hunt, the second baseman who built a twelve-year major league career on getting on base by any means necessary, died in St. Louis in July 2026. He was 85.

Hunt was born February 23, 1941, in St. Louis, the only child of Floyd Hunt, a Navy veteran turned butcher, and Bernice Hunt, a secretary. His maternal grandfather, Walter Gronemeyer, taught him the game in a St. Louis alley, playing catch and improvised bottle cap games years before Hunt ever wore a uniform. He played on a 1957 state championship team at Ritenour High School and drew football recruiting interest from Northwestern and Southern Illinois University, but chose baseball instead. In the summer of 1958, Milwaukee Braves scout Richard Keeley signed him after Hunt went 7 for 9 in a doubleheader, and he began his professional career with the Class D McCook Braves in Nebraska, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.

Hunt reached the Mets organization in 1963 used mainly as a bullpen catcher. Frustrated with the bench, he introduced himself to manager Casey Stengel directly: "I'm not a bullpen catcher, I'm a second baseman. Maybe I need a chance, see if I can play here." Stengel's answer, as Hunt told it for decades afterward, was just as blunt: "Son, you wanna play that bad? OK then. You start tomorrow." Hunt started the next day at Crosley Field in Cincinnati and never gave the job back. He hit .272 with 10 home runs as a rookie, finished runner-up to Pete Rose for National League Rookie of the Year, and was voted the Mets' Most Valuable Player that season.

In 1964, players elected Hunt to start at second base for the National League in the All-Star Game at Shea Stadium on July 7, making him the first Mets player to start the game. He went 1 for 3 and hit .303 on the season, the best average of any Mets regular. A shoulder injury from a base-path collision on May 11, 1965, required surgery and cost him most of that year, but he was back as an All-Star again in 1966, the season the Mets first climbed out of last place.

After the 1966 season, the Mets traded Hunt and Jim Hickman to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Tommy Davis and Derrell Griffith. Stops with the Dodgers and then the San Francisco Giants followed, and it was in San Francisco that the cost of his crowd-the-plate style became unmistakable. On August 31, 1969, a Tom Seaver fastball caught him in the head and he was carried off the field at Candlestick Park on a stretcher with a concussion. He was back in the Giants' lineup after a single day off. Hunt never described the pitches as bad luck. "Some folks give their bodies to science," he liked to say. "I gave mine to baseball," a line he repeated for decades and one recalled in coverage of his death by MLB Trade Rumors.

Traded to the Montreal Expos in January 1971, Hunt had the finest season of his career: he reached base in more than 40 percent of his plate appearances, struck out only 41 times, and absorbed those 50 hit-by-pitches on his way to being named the club's Player of the Year. Expos manager Gene Mauch, who spent three decades in the game, said of him: "Hunt chops away to every field. He invariably gets wood on the ball and seldom strikes out. He plays all-out in everything he does. The fact that he can endure pain enough to get hit and get on base merely typifies his entire approach," according to the Society for American Baseball Research. Hunt led the National League in hit-by-pitches for seven consecutive seasons, from 1968 through 1974, and retired with 243 for his career, still the sixth most in major league history. He was later inducted into the Montreal Expos Hall of Fame.

Claimed off waivers by his hometown St. Louis Cardinals in September 1974, Hunt played his final major league game on September 28, 1974, against the Chicago Cubs, closing out a career spent with the Mets, Dodgers, Giants, Expos and Cardinals.

Hunt returned to Wentzville, Missouri, where he ran a liquor store and a sporting goods store before founding the Ron Hunt Eagles Baseball Association in 1987. The instructional program drew players from twenty states and beyond, with Hunt as its taskmaster and his wife, Jackie, serving as what participants called its camp mom. Nearly 98 percent of the young players who came through it went on to play college baseball, according to the Society for American Baseball Research. He closed the program in 2003 but kept giving free baseball clinics around the country for years afterward.

Looking back in 2018, Hunt said: "I hope people remember me as a player who played the game right. I hope they remember me as someone who was a decent human being, who respected the game of baseball and gave it his best effort every day for as long as he could." As Hunt entered hospice care that July, Mets team historian Jay Horwitz said of him: "No one played the game harder than Ron Hunt, our first All-Star. In that All-Star year in 1964, he hit .303 and was the starting second baseman," a tribute repeated in coverage of his death by Forbes.

The number in the record book, fifty hit-by-pitches in a single season, has stood for more than five decades, and nobody has come within ten of it since. In Wentzville, the young players who passed through the Eagles program grew into college athletes because a stubborn former second baseman insisted that fundamentals mattered more than talent. And in Queens, a franchise now generations removed from Shea Stadium still traces its first All-Star start to a rookie who cornered Casey Stengel in spring training and asked, in plain words, for a chance nobody had thought to give him.