While the era of hitting pitchers has come and gone with the exception of Shohei Ohtani, starting pitchers once served as quiet weapons for National League teams. Travis Wood was no exception.
It’s already been accepted among baseball fans that what we witnessed in Game 4 of the 2025 NLCS was truly a once-in-a-lifetime performance from perhaps the sport’s greatest player of all-time.
Three home runs and a walk at the plate combined with six shutout innings and 10 strikeouts on the mound, Ohtani delivered perhaps the signature performance of his career to clinch a pennant for the Dodgers, showcasing his unmatched skill level on both sides of the field.
While Ohtani is truly a unicorn of a player of the likes that we will likely never see again, the previous era of baseball included much more subtlety behind the hitting abilities of pitchers, who were almost always slated at the bottom of the batting order and were expected to know how to bunt more than anything else.
Before the National League permanently did away with the pitcher hitting following the 2021 season, it served as the sole remaining distinction between itself and the American League, which adopted the designated hitter in 1973.
In this time, pitchers who had the ability to hit served as hidden weapons of sort on a roster – able to hold their own at the plate and give a good at-bat even if they weren’t able to get on base, while also serving as an additional pinch-hitting option.
This aspect of the game was at least mildly celebrated as a Silver Slugger award was given to the NL’s best hitting pitcher at the end of each season, but even the Silver Slugger awards didn’t always tell the full story.
That was certainly the case with former left-handed pitcher Travis Wood, arguably the best hitting pitcher to never win a Silver Slugger at the position. Primarily known for his time with the Chicago Cubs that included their 2016 World Series title, Wood also spent time with the Cincinnati Reds, San Diego Padres and Kansas City Royals.
In general, Wood likely isn’t a widely remembered player outside of Chicago. He played a relatively short eight-season career that saw solid efforts as both a starter and a reliever, highlighted with an All-Star campaign in 2013, when Wood served as the Cubs’ lone All-Star.
At the plate, however, Wood was truly one of the best at his position across the National League throughout the course of his career. Making a total of 327 regular season plate appearances, Wood posted 28 runs, 55 hits, 11 home runs and 37 runs batted in, good for a slash line of .185/.208/.329/.537.
Wood’s finest offensive season came in his last year as a full-time starter in 2014, which saw the right-handed hitting southpaw pitcher manage three home runs and two doubles alongside 10 RBI and a .232/.271/.429/.700 slash line.
While Wood was overshadowed by a .258 hitting Madison Bumgarner in Silver Slugger award voting, he maintained a reputation as one of the sport’s finest hitting pitchers that was solidified by advanced metrics.
This was perhaps perfectly exemplified in Wood’s 2014 season, which saw his performance on the mound take a noticeable dip after a stellar 2013 campaign that saw the lefty post a 3.12 ERA over 200 innings of work.
While Wood went 8-13 with a 5.03 ERA on the mound in 2014, coming in at -0.9 wins above replacement, the lefty ended up at a flat 0 WAR for the season overall thanks to supplying 0.9 WAR as a hitter. That trend showed beyond 2014 as well, with 2.0 of Wood’s 7.1 career WAR coming from the plate.
On top of having 12 home runs across his career (including the postseason), Wood boasts a pretty impressive list of pitchers he’s taken deep. Wood’s first career jack came as a first-pitch tank off Adam Wainwright in 2010, with a few other notable names on his hit list.
Wood also hit home runs off of Tim Lincecum, Jacob deGrom, Michael Wacha and Jake Peavy, the last of which being a grand slam still celebrated among Cubs fans in the context of the Crosstown Classic rivalry.
Wood’s most famous moment as a hitter unquestionably came in Game 2 of the 2016 National League Division Series, which saw the lefty enter the game in the fourth inning for an injured Kyle Hendricks.
After closing out the top of the fourth inning, Wood was due up second in the bottom half of the frame, slated to face Giants reliever George Kontos. Following a Willson Contreras groundout, Wood rocketed the first pitch he saw into the bleachers in left-center field, giving the Cubs a 5-2 lead.
Wood’s shot was just the fourth by a pitcher in the postseason in the 21st century, and the first of which to be hit by a reliever (Brandon Woodruff would later homer as a reliever in Game 1 of the 2018 NLCS).
While the moment ultimately served as a triumph late in Wood’s career as he retired following the 2017 season, his postseason home run was a perfect encapsulation of what made him a great hitter for his position.
It was crystal clear throughout his career that Wood honed in on the craft of hitting, and the mechanics certainly showed it – the batting stance of a slugger and a short, compact swing designed for hitting the ball on the screws.
I previously wrote about Carlos Zambrano’s stellar career as a hitting pitcher, and how his role would perhaps look different in today’s game that includes a DH across both leagues. I don’t mean to compare Wood to Zambrano – Zambrano was legitimately the best hitting pitcher of his era with a skillset that could easily play for a handful of starts at DH each season.
Although Wood impressed in three appearances as a left fielder in 2016, I don’t think there would be any validity to an outfield conversion of sorts for Wood, though I do think there’s a possibility he could be utilized more frequently in the position in today’s game.
However, Ohtani’s emergence as a two-way star hasn’t led to any other attempts in that realm since the DH was added to the NL in 2022. Michael Lorenzen, a pitcher who previously spent time as a two-way player in the 2019 season, has not seen outfield action since 2021.
With that said, Wood’s career is more of a phenomenal display of what fans lost with the addition of the DH to the National League. While some pitchers like Zambrano and Bumgarner were known for being at the top of their game at their position as both hitters and pitchers, there was also something incredibly exciting about watching pitchers that may not have been household names able to hold their own in the batter’s box.
For every Bumgarner or Arrieta home run that would dominate highlight reels, there was a Travis Wood or Micah Owings, putting up fantastic offensive numbers for their position while surprising unsuspecting opposing fans with production out of the nine-hole in the lineup.
Though it’s feasible to see a skillset like Wood’s being used offensively in today’s game, the lefty’s mostly overlooked career is remembered more as a feature of an era that has passed. Outside of Ohtani, a fan’s best bet to see a two-way player today is to watch a position player take the mound in a blowout.
Just not anywhere near as fun as pitchers hitting tanks.
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