A baseball is a wondrous little thing. It weighs 6 ounces -- the same as an apple -- and is the perfect size and shape for the hand. It is the ideal home for the proudest autographs, so white and pristine, resting on the mantel or in the trophy case. A shiny new baseball is known as a "pearl"; pearls are so elegant and romantic. It is what brings fathers and sons together in the backyard for a joyful, peaceful game of catch. It appears in springtime, like flowers and warm sunshine.

And yet, when that baseball is flying directly at a hitter at 95 mph, and that batter can hear the ball spinning, like the sound of a giant bee attacking, and then it hits that batter and those red seams bore into the skin like the teeth of a buzz saw, well, the elegance and romance of that pearl is replaced by piercing, pulsating, primal pain. It is pain that can last for weeks, it can leave a hideous mark that can last for months and it can instill a fear that can last forever. It is pain and accompanying fear that the average fan would experience once, then never go near home plate again. Yet it is pain and fear that major league players experience monthly, weekly, even daily, but they keep getting back in the batter's box, a courage that deserves our total admiration. It is what separates them from the rest of us.

"To me, the hit-by-pitch epitomizes the game of baseball," Padres catcher John Baker said. "The hit batsman, and the game, is all about, How much can you handle? How much pain can you handle? How much failure can you handle? How much embarrassment and fear can you handle? Those that handle it best are the ones that play the game for a long time."

The expression on Casey Kotchman's face says getting hit by a pitch can really hurt. Kim Klement/US Presswire

And yet, the hit-by-pitch numbers are confusing. Former Braves infielder Mark Lemke holds the major league record for most plate appearances -- 3,664 -- without getting hit by a pitch. The Mariners' Michael Saunders is the active player with the most plate appearances without a hit batsman; he's just over 1,000. Yet Lemke and Saunders were hit plenty of times in the minor leagues. Former major league outfielder Herm Winningham had 2,069 plate appearances without getting hit and says he never got hit by a pitch in the minor leagues, either. "The last time I got hit," he once said, "was diving back into first base on a pickoff throw." ESPN analyst John Kruk got hit by a pitch twice in 4,603 plate appearances. How can that be? Mickey Mantle was hit 13 times in his career. Tony Gwynn was hit 24 times.

The all-time leader is Hughie Jennings, whose career began in the 1800s. He was hit 287 times, once every 19.3 plate appearances. Craig Biggio was hit 285 times, followed by Tommy Tucker (272), Don Baylor (267), Jason Kendall (254) and Ron Hunt (243). Baylor, big and burly and tough, once was asked which one of the 267 hurt the most, and he grunted and said, "None of them." Kendall, who isn't as big or burly but is as tough as they come and got hit by pitches on purpose all the time, said of his 254, "They all hurt."

F.P. Santangelo, who played for four teams during his seven-year career, laughed and said, "I'm in the hit-by-pitch hall of fame -- most hit-by-pitches in a season by a switch-hitter: 25. I was a .245 hitter. I hit leadoff. I had to get on base any way I could. On-base percentage was my only good statistic. I learned how to lean in and get hit by strikes. Kendall and I had a side bet one year on who could get hit most; we bet a case of beer. I'd see him on the field before a game and I'd say, 'I'm at 17,' and he'd say, 'I'm at 18.' I think I still owe him a case of beer."

"When that ball is coming at your head at 95 mph, that is the fear of God. That sound you hear is the thumping of your heart."

-- Mike Macfarlane, former major league catcher.

It is not an exaggeration: the fear of God, the thumping of your heart. At that moment, when the ball is traveling at an incomprehensible rate of speed, the hitter has to make a decision. "And you have .28 seconds to figure it out," Yankees right fielder Nick Swisher said. Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine, whose cheekbone was shoved dangerously close to his brain when he was hit by a pitch in the face more than 40 years ago, said, "For all humanoids, those who breathe, when someone throws a baseball from 60 feet and throws it really hard, the FIRST thought is ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, 'Do I duck or swing?' The difference is the time that people take to decide whether to duck or to swing."

The average person ducks when the ball is coming near him; the big leaguer stays in and swings.

"The fans have no idea," Rays infielder Will Rhymes said. "They don't realize that they wouldn't even stand in there and track a pitch against a major league pitcher. And they are smart not to stand in there. At least we know how you're supposed to get out of the way."

“ It's a helpless feeling up there when you know you can't get out of the way. At that point, you just pray it doesn't hit you in the face. ” -- Tigers outfielder Brennan Boesch

And yet sometimes, there is no chance of escaping a pitch that is headed right at you.

"You can tell, on some pitches, right out of the hand, that it's going to hit you, no matter what you do," Angels right fielder Torii Hunter said. "You can tell when it slips off the inside of his hand, and you're thinking, 'Oh, s---.' If it's coming at your head, you turn your head because you don't want it to hit you in the face because I'm too pretty to be hit in the face. So you turn so it will hit you in the back of the head. If it's coming at your ribs, you turn so it will hit you in the back of the bicep. If it's going to hit you in the knee, you turn so it hits you in the back of the leg. It's amazing how quickly the human body can move when you're trying to avoid something hitting you. You have to know your soft spots."

And even the soft spots hurt.

"It's a helpless feeling up there," Tigers outfielder Brennan Boesch said, "when you know you can't get out of the way. At that point, you just pray it doesn't hit you in the face."

And yet, there is no time for prayer.

"There are two types of thoughts when the ball leaves the pitcher's hand," Indians outfielder Shelley Duncan said. "The first one, you see the ball, and about halfway to the plate, you have that 'Oh s---' moment. If you don't get ready for it, that's when you get hurt. The other one is the pitch that you know right away, you are going to wear it. You can turn your body, you get ready to get hit, but it all happens so fast. You have to make the adjustment because one second you are calm, then a split second later, your heart is racing."

Catchers have been known to yell, "Watch out!" when a pitch is headed for a hitter; the Yankees' Russell Martin has done that more than a few times. Braves outfielder Matt Diaz said, "I've yelled, 'Oh!' when the pitch was headed at me because I was sure it was going to hit me, then it didn't. I turned to the catcher, and he was laughing his a-- off. The umpire was chuckling. I said, 'I thought it was going to hit me.' They said, 'We did, too.'"

Orioles center fielder Adam Jones said, "Sometimes you just know it's going to hit you as soon as it leaves his hand, and you think, 'Oh, s---.' It freezes you up. You brace for impact."

"It was like my face was crushed by a bowling ball, a bowling ball going 95 mph."

-- Royals hitting coach Kevin Seitzer, on being hit in the face by a pitch by Scott Erickson in 1995.

Some major league players can't remember anything about a walk-off home run they hit or a game-turning grand slam, but ask any player about the hardest he has ever been hit by a pitch, and he will have the answer, without hesitation, with complete detail, always including velocity. The pain at that moment of impact is unfathomable and unforgettable.

"Danys Baez hit me with 97 [mph] in the ribs in 2002," Hunter said. "I lost my breath. I was gasping for air. It hurt so much. The ball just dropped at my feet. Those are the ones that hurt the most, the ones that hit you and drop straight down. And what did I do after I got hit? I just picked the ball up and threw it back at [Baez]. At that point, it just hurt so much, I was seeing red. I couldn't think straight anymore. It hurt so much, I couldn't think."

That was Robin Ventura's hilarious excuse for famously charging the mound after being hit by Nolan Ryan, who got Ventura in a headlock and started pounding away. "He threw so hard, it hurt so much, I didn't know what I was doing, so I just took off after him because of the pain," Ventura said. "I got about halfway to the mound, came to my senses and said, 'What am I doing charging Nolan Ryan?' But I couldn't turn back then."

It was too late for Robin Ventura to turn back, so Nolan Ryan added a headlock and a couple of haymakers to the pain of the pitch back in 1993. AP Photo/Linda Kaye

Diaz smiled and said, "I believe there is a connection that runs directly from your ribs to your brain. I got hit in the ribs; it was the worst. I kind of blacked out. When I woke up, I was yelling at [Marlins catcher] Ronny Paulino. Not smart. He's like 4 feet taller than me."

Mets third baseman David Wright said a shot to the ribs "will take your breath away. It's like jumping into freezing cold water. You need to take a knee to catch your breath. It hurts."

Swisher said, "I got hit by [Vicente] Padilla in the ribs at 97. I was so angry, I just charged the mound because he had thrown at me twice before. I couldn't feel the pain because I was so angry. Man, that s--- hurts. The average fan has no idea how much that ball hurts. I am amazed. I see screaming line drives go in the stands, and fans try to catch it barehanded. They are crazy. I wouldn't try to catch that ball with a glove on. But nothing is worse than one in the ribs. My bruise there lasted a good three weeks."

Said Orioles third baseman Mark Reynolds: "The ribs are the worst. It's like getting hit with an uppercut but without boxing gloves on. It knocks the wind out of you. When you see the guy bending over at home plate, he is catching his breath. He's taking inventory to make sure everything is still there. When the guy strolls to first, he's not Cadillac-ing it; he needs 10-15 [seconds] to catch his breath and try to forget the pain. It is intense for 30 or 45 seconds."

Hitters say getting hit in the butt is the best place because it is flesh, not bone, and that getting one in the back doesn't hurt as much as a lot of other areas. Hunter disagreed, saying, "Getting hit in the back really hurts, too. I tell people, 'Take your shirt off and let me hit you in the middle of your back with my open hand as hard as I can, and see how much that hurts.' With a baseball, multiple that by two or three and that's what it feels like. When you get hit like that, it's going to leave a mark [and] it hurts for a lot longer than that."

"I was in Double-A, and [teammate] Melky Cabrera hit a home run, and he pimped it all around the bases, and I thought, 'Oh, no, I'm going to get killed here.' So Matt Lindstrom hit me in the back at 100 mph. When it hits you right, it's like someone slaps you in the face; it wakes you up. The pain eventually went away, but whenever someone touched me on that place that I was hit, it would hurt, and that lasted for at least a couple of weeks. The bruise starts out black and blue; it looks like the eclipse of the sun, the area around the mark left by the ball. Then it gets really blue. It is pretty neat looking."

-- Shelley Duncan.

Jones laughed and said, "That blue is just beautiful. It is so awesome what blood can do."

Hunter said hitters try to get hit in a soft spot. The knee is not a soft spot.

"Kevin Brown hit me in the kneecap, broke my kneecap, and I played with a broken kneecap for two months because I wasn't coming out of the lineup," Santangelo said. "Earlier in the game, I leaned in and took one off the thigh on purpose, and Kevin was so mad, he said, 'So, you want to get hit?' and he hit me in the kneecap with [a] mid-90s [fastball]. Years later, he gave me a bat with a bull's-eye on it and he signed it, 'To F.P., my favorite target.' I had to have surgery on that knee. It still hurts today all the time. He hit me in 1997."

"I got hit with a 97 mph fastball from Brandon League. It hit me on the top of the knee; if it had hit me lower, it would have shattered my kneecap. I take playing in the major leagues seriously; you'd have to kill me to get me out of a game. It happened in the seventh inning. I figured I would only have to catch one more inning. I could do that. The bigger problem was that it came two days after I got hit in the side of the head -- that required six stitches -- after being hit with the backlash of Albert Pujols' bat while I was catching. When League hit me, it really hurt, my leg went numb, but as I was jogging to first, the cut on my head opened up, I had blood running down the side of my face. So even though my knee hurt, it wasn't as bad as two days earlier. There is a scale of pain, a scale of feeling. Anything below the highest level doesn't hurt nearly as much as it should."

-- John Baker.

The Braves' Eric Hinske said, "Sidney Ponson hit me on the inside of the knee with a 95 [mph fastball]. I thought I had been shot with a gun. I went down like a sack of potatoes. But I stayed in the game. You wrap it up and keep playing. The lump on my shin was there at least a month."

Nationals first baseman Adam LaRoche has been hit 15 times in his career, but none harder than the time he was hit in the back of the knee by a 90-plus mph cutter thrown by Josh Johnson.

"That's the worst pain I've ever felt on a baseball field," LaRoche said. "The ball hit me so hard, it bounced halfway back to the pitcher's mound. I went straight to the ground after that one. When I got back up, I had to take a knee. I was just trying not to throw up."