Non-Pitchers on the Mound

Compiled by David Vincent, David Smith, and Mark Pankin

Since the early days of professional baseball, there has been a distinction between pitchers and other players, generally termed "position players." Occasionally a position player takes the mound, usually due either to a lopsided score and a desire to conserve the pitching staff for another day or a long extra inning game in which most regular pitchers have already been used. To be included on the list below, we identified all players who appeared in more games as non-pitchers than as pitchers in a season and set a limit of at most eight games on the mound in a season with some common sense exceptions such as Hanser Alberto's 10 pitching appearances in 2022.

Additionally, those rare players who appear as both a starting pitcher and a non-pitcher during a season(s) are excluded from this list as we generally consider these players to be pitchers. The practice of a player being simultaneously a pitcher and a non-pitcher was somewhat common from the 1890s through the 1910s with Shohei Ohtani being a recent example. Ohtani's dual status has even led to a rules change and it is appropriate to consider him as a pitcher for the purposes of this web page and he is one of the reasons for imposing the limit.

This page presents the known instances of non-pitchers pitching in a game since 1901. It is a chronological list, and the information is also available as an alphabetical listing (click here). Click on the player's name to see his career page. Click on the date to see the box score and play-by-play, if available. For some of these games, we do not have play by play information and the statistics will be incomplete in those cases.

At the end of the page are some summary tables with the individuals who appear on the list the most often and the years with the most instances.

If you know of other instances, please contact the web master.