Padres third baseman Ryan Schimpf is baseball's biggest oddity.

In many ways, Schimpf's name could rightly be said alongside such sluggers as Aaron Judge and Bryce Harper. At the same time, Schimpf has also been one of the worst players in Major League Baseball. The history of the game has seen plenty of players who have hit home runs while sporting a low batting average, but Schimpf is perfecting the craft to a level that has never been reached before.

Simply put, there isn't a more distinctive player in the game today, with his eye-popping combination of fly balls, home runs, strikeouts and a batting average that would make Mario Mendoza blush.

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Through the start of play Tuesday, Schimpf is hitting .167 in 181 plate appearances for San Diego in 2017. He has struck out 60 times (33.1 percent) and collected 25 total hits, but 13 of those hits are home runs. Despite having the lowest batting average in the majors, Schimpf is tied for 10th place on the home run leaderboard.

And if you think that's impressive, consider that Schimpf has 33 home runs in 511 career plate appearances while posting a preposterous .200 batting average. That's 33 homers out of just 85 total hits, meaning 38.8 percent of his base knocks have gone over the fence.

But what makes Schimpf truly stand out isn't necessarily the home run totals, but how he arrives at them.

Schimpf hits fly balls at an unprecedented rate.

Batted ball data has been kept as far back as the 2002 season, and according to FanGraphs the league-average fly ball percentage is around 35 percent. Including all players with a minimum of 400 plate appearances since '02, Schimpf is far and away the major league leader with 64.8 percent fly ball rate. Second on the list is former White Sox slugger and Hall of Famer Frank Thomas, at a comfortably distant 54.9 percent.

That seems like a stat that should accompany a well-known slugger such as Mike Trout, Giancarlo Stanton or Kris Bryant. If you're thinking that Schimpf doesn't really fit in the same sentence as those guys, you're right. He's not what you would typically think of as a major home run hitter, standing at 5-9 and 180 pounds with a frame more reminiscent of a running back than a baseball player. Even his name, which sounds suspiciously like “shrimp,” works to fool the brain into dismissing him as a power hitter.

The left-handed batter was 28 years old when he was called up in June 2016 after parts of eight seasons in the minors. He got off to a slow start after making his major league debut, but Schimpf collected his first home run (and fourth total hit) in a Padres uniform on July 1 — in his 14th game played.

That would be just the beginning for him.

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In the age of Statcast, launch angle and examining every aspect of how a ball is put into play, the Padres' cleanup hitter is an anomaly — one unlike the game has ever seen. But to better understand the fly balls, we have to briefly dive into the data.

According to MLB.com's Statcast definitions, the launch angle on a batted ball generally defines anything under 10 degrees as a ground ball, while line drives fall between 10 and 25 degrees, fly balls are between 25 and 50 degrees, and a popup is over 50 degrees. That makes sense, even to those of us who are geometry-challenged. Guess who is leading all of baseball with an average launch angle of 32 degrees. Schimpf. In fact, there are only 10 players with an average launch angle above 22 degrees, and Schimpf is the only one to cross the 30-degree plateau.

Hence, all the balls in the air — many of which sail over the outfield wall.

Schimpf's fly ball pace appears to be unsustainable, but that's based solely on the fact that we've never seen it before. He only swings at around 20 percent of pitches outside the strike zone, which falls well under the major league average of around 30 percent. The ability to wait for good pitches helps his cause quite a bit, ensuring that he'll continue to get them — and inevitably hit them in the air.

All those fly balls helped Schimpf hit the first 30 home runs of his career in just 483 plate appearances and on just 81 hits. That was spread over parts of two seasons, but we can make comparisons by looking at what other players have done in a single year.

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The list of players who have hit 30 or more home runs with 81 or fewer hits in a single season has just one name on it: Mark McGwire, who accomplished the feat in 2000 at age 36 with the Cardinals. At that time, Big Mac was still the single-season home run leader with the 70 he clubbed in 1998. He played just 89 games for the Cards in 2000, though, collecting 72 total hits — 32 of them home runs — in 321 plate appearances.

Throwing out the extremely low hit totals, which is what makes Schimpf truly unparalleled, only 27 batters in MLB history have hit 30 or more home runs in a season in 483 or fewer plate appearances — and none did it with a batting average of .200 or lower.

In 2017, Schimpf is on pace to hit more than 40 home runs but fewer than 40 singles. If he were to actually achieve that feat, he'd be the first player in baseball history to do so. The list of players to hit 30 or more homers and 40 or fewer singles in a season is contained to just three occurrences: McGwire in 1995 and 2000, and Barry Bonds in 1999.

It seems weird tossing out such historic names such as Bonds and McGwire alongside Schimpf. But the early portion of his career has been a legendary run, at least when considering the fly ball rate, the home runs and the complete inability to do much else at the plate.

Schimpf may not be an All-Star, a household name or a future Hall of Famer, but he could be a once-in-a-lifetime quirk in the annals of baseball history.

SN contributor Ryan Davis can be reached at ryan.davis1786@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @RyanQDavis.