Today on MLB Monday, we’re going old school (again): it’s Manny Mota time. We don’t really have a good nickname for him, but he’s in his age-87 season today … still. We love to see that, so we’re celebrating him today for his .304 lifetime batting average across 20 MLB seasons from 1962-1980, with one more major-league plate appearance in 1982. With just 1,149 hits, though, across 4,227 PAs, he’s quite the anomaly, eh?

A lot has been said about Mota already, both during his career and after it. We are here to commemorate his plate acumen and discipline, as he really only had one season as a full-time starter (1970), and that came when he was in his age-32 season. He primarily played left field, but Mota also excelled as a pinch hitter and as a utility guy, filling in at second, third, center, right, and catcher during his career (minus-6.9 dWAR).

He didn’t need to be outstanding with the glove, not while he was hitting .304 at the plate and rarely striking out (320 total Ks, plus 289 walks). He simply made contact, put the ball in play, and let the chips fall where they may, so to speak. He didn’t have speed (50 stolen bases against 42 times caught), and he didn’t have power (just 31 home runs in his career). To paraphrase the old joke, all he did was get base hits, really.

Mota also hit .375 in three Octobers combined (1974, 1977–1978), each time with the Los Angeles Dodgers on teams that ended up losing the World Series to dynasties from Oakland and New York, respectively. That is just bad luck, obviously. From mid-1969 forward, he only played for the Dodgers, and he didn’t play in the one season the team won the World Series (1981) during his tenure there. Go figure; it just doesn’t seem fair.

He broke into the majors with the San Francisco Giants in 1962, playing in 47 games and hitting just .176 in the process at age 24. Then, he was traded to the Houston Colt .45s for the 1963 campaign, yet before he ever played a game for them, they flipped him to the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he spent the next six seasons—hitting .297 in 642 games for the Bucs ( .735 OPS, 110 OPS+). But those were the years between Pirates titles.

While Pittsburgh would win the World Series in 1960 and 1971, the Mota years there were not golden: the Pirates never finished above third in the old National League during the 1963-1968 period, and Mota was snared by the expansion Montréal Expos in a dispersal draft before the 1969 season. However, after just 31 games north of the border, where he hit .315, the expansion team traded him to the Dodgers, interestingly.

That was a crazy trade, as the Expos sent Mota and Maury Wills to L.A. for Ron Fairly and Paul Popovich. Wills had also been an expansion pick for Montréal from Pittsburgh, while Fairly had earned three rings with the Dodgers in Los Angeles (1959, 1963, 1965). For the record, we had to look up Popovich and his minus-1.8 career WAR to remember who he was—no one, as it turns out. We don’t mean that cruelly, but …

We digress: Mota found his forever home with the Dodgers in Southern California. Over parts of 13 seasons in L.A., he hit .315 in 816 regular-season games. His plate discipline also peaked here, with 178 walks and just 127 Ks, as Mota established his well-earned reputation as one of the best pinch hitters in MLB history. He was the primary starter in left for the Dodgers in 1970, earning a career-high 2.9 WAR across 124 games.

In 1972, he received MVP votes while posting 2.7 WAR in 118 games while hitting .323—and even better? He was recognized for his hitting prowess in 1973 with an All-Star nod, as he hit .314 in 89 games. Those in the know always say how hard pinch hitting is, when you have to be ready at a moment’s notice to get loose and enter the game against any one of the opponent’s pitchers at any given time. It takes adaptability to succeed.

And Mota had that skill, writ large. Yes, he did hit .309 as a starter in MLB, but he also delivered a .281 average as a pinch hitter/substitution player, drawing more walks (72) than collecting strikeouts (64), which is impressive. Of course, most major leaguers with his skill set would happy just hitting .281 overall, but Mota’s abilities were perhaps underused his entire career, even if he found a lot of success being used as was.

He played in a time of small salaries, and as Mota approaches his 88th birthday in 2026, we wish him the best. With just 17.7 career WAR total, he isn’t bound for Cooperstown, but we respect what he did for a living and how well he did it for as long as he did, no matter which teams he was playing for at the time. Imagine if the Giants had not traded him to the Pirates to get Joey Amalfitano back; yeah, exactly. Fate is interesting.

Editor’s Note: Mota had a long and successful career as a Dodgers coach, winning rings in 1981 and 1988.