Tonight at Wrigley Kerry Wood pitched a four-hit, eleven-K gem of a shutout (2-0) that not only finished a three-game sweep of the Mets, but drew them to within one game of division-leading Houston (who are still playing and losing in Colorado).

The oddest thing about the game was not the fact that Wood was close to being scratched for a bad back but pulled off a Michael Jordan-esque recovery. Nor was it Jack Black's explosivo rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh-inning stretch (he must have used his invention, inward singing, to belt it out).

The strangest thing, in my humble opinion, was Wood hitting Roger Cedeno with a pitch in the first? "Plunking Cedeno-How is that so odd?" you ask? Is it because Cedeno had not been hit by a pitch all year? No, he had been pasted by a pitch eleven times in his career coming into the game, the same number of times that he has been intentionally walked. Is it because giving Roger Cedeno a free pass to first is like letting Jeremy Schaap host "Outside the Lines"?-it just should not be allowed. No, balls get away from pitchers, even against batters with .326 on-base percentages. Was it because his heart was two sizes too small? No, now you have him confused with the Grinch.

The reason it was so odd was that Cedeno became the 21st man this season to be soaked at the plate by Wood. No pitcher has exceeded 21 hit batsmen since Howard Ehmke hit 23 in 1922. Of course, it's nowhere near the all-time high of 41 by Iron Joe McGinnity in 1900. Here are the all-time leaders (thanks to Lee Sinins' sabermetric database):

You'll notice that even though there are some stinkers on the list (Frank Bates, anyone?), there are some pretty good seasons mixed in. McGinnity himself was 28-8 with a 2.94 ERA (31% better than the park-adjusted league average) the year he established the dubious record.

It got me to thinking-is a high hit-batsmen total indicative of a wild pitcher or of a pitcher who is willing to throw inside and sometimes pays the consequences? Well, this may be less than scientific, but my thought was to take the ratio of hit batsmen to the ratio of walks and wild pitches (above). Is the ratio of those ratios consistent for our list of ne'er-do-wells? If so, then one could say that high hit batsmen totals are a result of wild hurlers.

Well, the ratios run from almost 50% (Gus Shallix in 1884) to a little over 10% (Mike Morrison in 1887). Wood is somewhere in the middle with 19.81%. The average is 23% or about 1 hit batsmen for every four walks or wild pitches. And the standard deviation is rather large at 7.19 or a swing of about one in every seven for those pitchers less than one standard deviation away from the norm.

So, what the heck am I saying? It appears that high hit batsmen totals result as much from a pitcher's approach as from any wildness inherent in the pitcher's arm. "Well, of course", you're saying. I know that the estimable Coach from "Cheers" did extensive work on this topic. I just wanted to see it for myself.