Speaking of coincidences, one of the sadder I can recall is the brief career of Ken Hunt. There have been two Ken Hunts in baseball history, a pitcher and an outfielder, whose careers burst into stardom and then fizzled out almost exactly simultaneously in early 1961, which was the only year one of them played in MLB at all, and the only year that the other played more than a pittance. ("Pittance" is defined here as "averaging more than 70 plate appearances per year," which the outfielding Ken Hunt failed to do in the five years he played in MLB other than 1961.) That also happened to be the first year that I can recall following baseball. Mazeroski’s HR the previous October is something I learned about only through reading afterwards, but I followed the 1961 season passionately, and I was lucky enough that summer to root for the Cincinnati Reds, who won the NL pennant, thanks in part to their rookie pitcher Ken Hunt, although by the time I actually started rooting for the Reds, his baseball career was effectively over.
Hunt was incredibly impressive for the first ten weeks of the season. By June 21st, he had won 8 games as a starting pitcher, losing only 3, with a 2.73 ERA in 89 innings, which projects out to something like 19-8 in 225 innings over the full 154-game season, Rookie of the Year material. In fact, Hunt won the Sporting News’ NL Rookie Pitcher of the Year award, despite not doing a damned thing after June 21st. In the remaining 90 games of Cincinnati’s schedule, he was jerked from the starting rotation by early August, and his record for those 90 games is a horrible 1-7 W-L record and a 6.27 ERA in under 50 innings. It was a very good 10 weeks while it lasted. Hunt never pitched an inning in MLB again, though he did play for four more seasons in the minors after that. (And actually he did pitch exactly one inning of mop-up relief in that year’s World Series, but that was it for him.) Finito. Done. Goom-bye.
Meanwhile, in the American League that year, outfielder Ken Hunt was having an even more eye-popping rookie season—at least until mid-June. This Ken Hunt (Kenneth L. Hunt, as opposed to Kenneth R. Hunt, although both were righties all the way) was batting .309, with an impressive OBP of .387 and an even more impressive SLG of .597 as of the late afternoon of June 6th. (I’m drawing a very fine line here, between games of a doubleheader, to cherry-pick precisely where this Ken Hunt’s season, and career, fell apart.) Projected out to 162 games (that was the only season that the NL played 154 and the AL played 162) those averages remain, of course, but the counting stats would add up to 33 HRs and 98 RBIs, again sure-shot ROTY material. (Neither Hunt received a vote in their leagues’ ROTY awards, but this Hunt’s projected stats were slightly better than those of NL outfielder Billy Williams, who won the ROTY award there, and the other Hunt’s projected stats are slightly better than those of pitcher Don Schwall, who won the AL’s ROTY award, for what it’s worth.) To complete the ugly picture, starting with the second game of that doubleheader, this Ken Hunt’s slash numbers fell to .232/.300/.438, which are just about his career stats over six years, including his hot first 10 weeks of 1961.
The outfielding Ken Hunt had come to the Angels from the Yankees, where he had been competing with the likes of Mantle and Maris for an outfield spot. (He had been a boyhood friend, in fact, of Maris’s in North Dakota, and he roomed with Maris during his brief stay with the club in 1960.) Hunt’s career after June of 1961 was even more frustrating than his career before that spring—he injured his shoulder throwing in a 1962 spring training game, and would never again bat 200 times in his three remaining seasons with the Angels and the Senators. His one claim to fame outside of baseball is that he married a woman with a small child who went on to play Eddie Munster in the TV series of that name and later became the current Speaker of the House. (OK, not that last one, but Hunt did appear with his stepson in a Munsters episode, "Herman the Rookie" in 1965.) He is buried in Fargo, North Dakota, a few feet from Roger Maris’s grave. The other Hunt is buried in Utah. Both men were out of baseball by 1966.
Like I said, a mostly sad story, but one that would be less unusual but for the coincidence of both men sharing a name and an exact period of MLB stardom for the only time in either of their lives. Worth thinking about, perhaps, the next time you get all worked up about a rookie getting off to a hot start.