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San Francisco Giants' Hunter Pence Meets Bill Nye the Science Guy
One of the most unusual players in the major leagues, the San Francisco Giants' Hunter Pence, was a guest on an episode of "Bill Nye Saves the World" on Netflix.
One of the great things about baseball is the wide variety of players who play the game. Physically, you can have a five-foot-six, 165-pound Jose Altuve hitting line drives all over the park or a six-foot-seven, 282-pound Aaron Judge launching monster home runs. Pitchers can be successful with a fastball that averages 98 mph, like Noah Syndergaard, or a 77 mph knuckleball, like R.A. Dickey.
Then there are the personalities. You can't help but love Ichiro, who is still in the league slashing and dashing and adding to his 3,034 career hits at the age of 43. Bartolo "Big Sexy" Colon has his own cult following, with fans cheering the surprisingly nimble plays he makes in the field and the occasional hit he gets at the plate.
Even the greatest player in the game, Mike Trout, has his odd side. He loves weather. He can't get enough of it. In 2015, a Reddit user went through Mike Trout's Twitter account and tracked Trout's obsession with weather. At the time, Trout followed 17 different meteorologists and more than 20 weather-related accounts. Then, last January, Trout was interviewed about the weather on the East Coast by Jim Cantore.
Of all the interesting, some might say oddball, players in MLB, the Giants' Hunter Pence has to be near the top of the list. Pence is an outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, but he's not your typical MLB player. Pence does things a little differently. His swing, for example, is the perfect combination of energetic awkwardness that defines pretty much everything he does.
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A 2011 article at Bleacher Report named Pence 11th on the list of 15 most successful "ugly swings" of baseball. They called his swing "max effort, but a little rough around the edges." He looks like someone who never had a batting coach in his life. He just grabs a bat and takes his hacks, sometimes swinging, and hitting, pitches he has no business offering at.
As ugly as his swing is, it works. In his career, he's been 20 percent better than league average as a hitter when league and ballpark effects are taken into account (120 wRC+). That ranks him right there with Pete Rose (121 wRC+), Dave Parker (120 wRC+), and Derek Jeter (119 wRC+).
In the field, Pence makes all the plays but rarely with the smooth, athletic grace of many big league outfielders. He runs a bit like Phoebe from Friends, all arms and legs swinging wildly, then sticks his glove out and the ball lands in it. Of course, that's not to detract from the plays he makes. He may not look graceful, but he's made some terrific catches, including this one as he fell over the bullpen mound.
Off the field, Pence has had his interesting moments. When Mark Melancon signed with the San Francisco Giants this offseason, he was reunited with Pence. They had been teammates on the Astros a few years before. Melancon tells the story of Pence asking him about hot yoga, something Melancon has done for some time. Pence wanted to try it, so Melancon took him to the gym. Melancon wrote about it for The Players' Tribune:
"After about five or 10 minutes, I take a peek over at Hunter, and he looks like he's about to die. He's drenched in sweat and just … struggling. But he gives me this look like, It's cool. Everything's O.K. It's just yoga.
The competitor in him wouldn't give in to the heat, or allow him to pace himself. So he's over there trying to max out every single pose. Just trying to nail everything. And, you know, during your first yoga class that's nearly impossible to do."
The story ends with Pence about killing himself doing hot yoga, then having an interesting experience afterwards. It's classic Pence, full of energy and enthusiasm, to the point of exhaustion.
A more recent Hunter Pence Experience involved our hero and Bill Nye the Science Guy. "Bill Nye Saves the World" is a new 13-episode series on Netflix in which special guests and subject matter experts appear. The guests explore problems encountered in daily life and the experts appear on the show to refute anti-scientific claims.
Hunter Pence appears in one of the episodes and he looks the part of a madcap scientist, with wild hair, a shaggy beard and crazy eyes. For those old enough to remember the 1990s, Pence looks like he could be the long lost brother of the lead singer of the Spin Doctors, a quintessentially 90s band that had a two big hits ("Two Princes" and "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong").
On the Bill Nye Netflix show, Pence used a bat for a science demonstration in which he hit baseballs into a model of Mars. The purpose is to show how an asteroid might impact the planet. If there's any MLB player who could be associated with Mars, it's Hunter Pence. As Bill Nye said, "He was charming, He's a really cool guy." Yes, yes he is, Bill Nye. He very much is.
