Plunk rocker: How Diamondbacks rookie Tim Locastro keeps playing the hit-by-pitches

Tim Locastro has no time for pain.

The Diamondbacks outfielder is always on the move, pathologically unable to sit still. There’s only one time he seems to be able to muster the will to remain stationary, and it would seem to be the one time that movement would be most useful. Whenever he’s targeted by a baseball – a deadly projectile when in the hands of a big-league pitcher – Locastro simply stays put. That may be why teammate Kevin Cron says Locastro has “a little bit of a screw loose.”

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But Locastro isn’t still for long. As quickly as the ball reaches him, he’s on the move again. The bat is tossed to the side, the elbow guard discarded. He’s on to take his base. His face betrays no grimace, his arms do not reach reflexively for the area of impact. For Locastro, this is all routine.

In his lone plate appearance Wednesday against the Rockies, Locastro was hit by his 12th pitch of the season. That plunker’s dozen have come in just 93 plate appearances, a rate of one beaning every 7.6 trips to the plate. If that seems like a lot, it most certainly is. Anthony Rizzo leads all major-leaguers with 130 hit-by-pitches since 2010. He earns one every 37 plate appearances. Locastro is on pace for just 200 plate appearances in the majors this season, but he’s also on pace to be hit 25 times. That total would tie him for fourth-most in a single season since 2010.

The Diamondbacks have had hitters more than willing to wear a pitch, including outfielder Jon Jay last season, but no one has approached Locastro’s prolificacy. It’s a phenomenon that Locastro struggles to fully explain. There are ingredients of an explanation – a set-up close to the plate, a book that says to pitch him inside, the stubbornness to just not move out of the way – but even then Locastro doesn’t know why so many pitches find him.

Take the pitch that hit him Wednesday. It was a Bryan Shaw cutter that didn’t cut, the type of pitch that zooms up and in and surprises you. Locastro took it off the back of his left shoulder. Had Adam Jones been in the batter’s box – or Nick Ahmed or Paul Goldschmidt or Mike Trout or any right-handed hitter on Earth – it would have hit him, too.

But it didn’t. It might have been destiny.

“There’s times I go through stretches where I get hit right between the numbers or the side of the leg, and that’s just like a magnet,” he said. “I don’t know how that happens.”

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If he sounds like he’s searching for a solution to that riddle, he’s not. He doesn’t bemoan his lot in life. He’s not the sport’s Job, singled out by the baseball gods for special punishment. He feels blessed. Once every 7.6 plate appearances, he gets a free trip to first base.

Those less fortunate, batters who routinely avoid collisions with high-speed objects, they have his sympathy. Empathy is a bit harder to come by, though. He can’t fathom why anyone would get out of the way of good fortune.

“There’s some people in the big leagues or college, they get hit once or twice their whole career, and I just find that crazy,” Locastro said. “If you’ve got to get on base, get on base however you can.”

It would be easy to write off Locastro’s 12 beanballs as a statistical fluke, an odd glitch made possible by a small sample size. But this has been Locastro’s thing for a while.

He has 161 HBPs in the minors, a total that comprises more than 6 percent of his minor-league plate appearances. They often come in bunches. Last August, he was hit 18 times. On May 16 of this year, he was plunked three times in a Triple-A game. He was called up eight days later and was plunked three more times that night.

It’s a skill that mystifies his teammates.

“I feel like every 10 times I go to the plate, I don’t see one pitch in those 10 at-bats that would have hit me if I didn’t get out of the way,” said Cron, who has been Locastro’s teammate in both the majors and Triple A this year. “And he’s getting that amount. It’s crazy.”

There is a method to Locastro’s masochism, though. First, he sets up close to the plate. Second, pitchers love to pitch him inside. His mechanics include a load that turns his back slightly toward the mound, making it both harder to get out of the way and easier to avoid taking a pitch off the hand. It’s easier to wear pitches when they don’t do serious damage.

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Not that they don’t hurt, of course. They do, although sometimes counterintuitively. In his plunking hat trick in the minors this year, he took pitches off the helmet, elbow and butt cheek. Only the latter left him with anything that humans would call pain. “Getting hit in your butt kills,” he said. He collects bruises like lucky pennies, and they usually take until Christmas to fade fully.

Locastro simply plays on, a pain tolerance he chalks up to the adrenaline that flows through his bloodstream during games. But it’s also just as much about what’s going through his head. The best way to not be scared of the ball, he’s learned, is to be scared of being a wuss.

Spring training at Division III Ithaca College in upstate New York begins indoors because it’s too cold to function out of them. That seems to be about the only concession the Bombers make to physical comfort.

Early on, freshmen are subject to haranguing by upperclassmen whenever they’d duck away from a pitch. “If you got hit by a pitch inside that cage and you acted like you got hurt, it was not a good thing,” said Colby Gee, one of Locastro’s college teammates. “Ever since we were freshmen and you got plunked in the cage, you pretty much had to stay in there or else you looked like a softy.”

At times, it could be “a little verbally abusive,” Gee said, but his voice doesn’t drip with concern when he says it. The Bombers took pride in their rough-and-tumble attitude. Toughness was paramount. Neither Locastro nor Gee wore batting gloves. Locastro still goes Viking-style, to use the phrasing of former Diamondbacks pitcher Josh Collmenter. Intra-team throwdowns weren’t uncommon.

“We were scrappers,” Gee said. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but a bunch of us got into a couple fights off the field. T-Lo would dabble in a couple of those.”

Locastro was the best player on the field in college – he’s the first Ithaca alum to make the big leagues since Earl Williams in 1970 – and that meant he was also the best at attracting a plunking. His sophomore season, he was hit 17 times in 33 games. As a junior, he was hit 27 times in 48. Gee tried to hang in there, but he couldn’t keep up. “He’d get mad when I’d get like three in a game and he only had one,” Locastro said.

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Ithaca was all about on-base percentage, and being on base meant an opportunity to steal another. Locastro was known for his blazing speed – he stole 40 bags in 41 tries as a junior – and to him, a ball off the butt and a steal of second was as good as a double. (It’s worth noting that Locastro doesn’t have a single such backdoor double in the majors this year, although he is 5-for-5 in stealing bases.)

The rulebook technically says that batters have to make an effort to get out of the way of pitches – violators are given just a ball in the count rather than a free base – although that’s hardly ever enforced. Pitchers might hate it, but their opinions don’t much matter to Locastro.

“If you’re on my team, you sort of love it,” he said. “Getting on base. Guys like hitting with guys on base rather than nobody on base. I’m just going to do it to help my team. I don’t care what other people think.”

There are perhaps two reasons Locastro might someday start bailing out in the batter’s box. One is because of injury, and it seems incredible that it hasn’t happened yet. Locastro’s body turns all sorts of shades of red and blue during the season – “He would show us these raspberries, these big bruises on his legs,” Gee said. “He was like a lacrosse player on his legs” – but those ailments rarely knocked him out of commission. Gee “can’t think of one time he got hurt.”

There was one instance, when Locastro was in High A with the Dodgers. He took a fastball right to the hamstring, and, after a few days, it developed into a hematoma. It restricted his movement so much that it knocked him out of action for a couple of weeks. But that’s the only injury resulting from any of the 176 pitches that have hit him in the pros.

There have been pitches to the head, but those have glanced off without any damage. He wears the C-flap helmet to protect his face in the minors – this year, the Diamondbacks required all their minor-leaguers to do so – but favors a normal helmet when in the big leagues. The C-flaps restricted his vision, he said. If he’s tempting fate, he seems unconcerned. “I think it definitely helps,” he said. “I just haven’t been using it of late.”

If injuries don’t slow down the pace of his plunkings, perhaps pitchers will do it for him. He’s carrying just a .230 average but a .387 on-base percentage in the big leagues this season, but his on-base would drop to .258 if those hit-by-pitches instead resulted in outs. (That’s, of course, a best-case swing of circumstances for the pitcher.) Even then, Locastro will consider that a victory. “Maybe they’ll try to start throwing away,” he said, “but then hopefully I can use it to my advantage and start driving the ball for more power.”

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Locastro figures he can’t keep up this once-every-7.6-plate-appearances pace. “I think it’ll all even out,” he said. But Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo thinks otherwise; “I don’t see any reason for that trend to stop,” the manager said. Locastro might wind up getting hit less frequently, but he’ll still get hit more often than just about everybody else.

That’s just his life.

“You just get to the point where it’s part of the game,” he said. “For me, at least.”

(Top photo of Tim Locastro reacting after being hit by a pitch in Atlanta: Dale Zanine / USA Today Sports)

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