For those of you who are fans of the gritty art of being hit by a lot of pitches, you may already know how important it was when Carlos Quentin took a 5th inning plunking from Clay Buchholz last night.  First, it was the 79th HBP of the season for the White Sox, tying their single season record set in 2005.  Many people might consider the 2005 season the best in White Sox history, but the HBP numbers say 2010 is every bit as good.  In HBPs.  Second and more interestingly, that was Quentin's 20th plunk of the season, and since Juan Pierre already has 21 HBPs, the 2010 White Sox are the 2nd team in American League history, and the 7th overall to have 2 players get hit by 20 pitches.

Prior to the 2010 season, the last time two players on the same team got hit by 20 pitches was during the Taft administration, when Kid Elberfeld and Doc Gessler finished 1st and 2nd in the majors with 25 and 20 HBPs for the 1911 Washington Senators.  Somehow Elberfeld was edged out for the MVP award by some guy named Cobb who batted .420.  Since then we've gone nearly 100 years without any team having two players break the 20 plunk mark, and the White Sox would have been the first since 1911 to do it - except that Prince Fielder got his 20th plunk on August 11th, and Rickie Weeks joined him on August 15th.  So that's only happened 7 times in the history of major league baseball, going back to the American Association Baltimore Orioles in 1893 (Curt Welsh 36HBP, Pete Gilbert 28 HBP), and now both the 2010 Brewers and 2010 White Sox have had two different players crack the 20 HBP mark.  That's just weird.  

(Random Side Note:  While only 2 teams in modern times have had a 20 plunk duo on them, I believe there were actually 5 players in the league this year who were part of such a pair of teammates - because Kid Elberfeld and David Eckstein are secretly the same person. I suspect that in 2015, Eckstein will be somehow involved in the making of Back to the Future part 4, and a production accident will send him back to 1898, where he will become a baseball player under the name Kid Elberfeld.  2015 is of course the 30th anniversary of the original Back to the Future, and is also the future year Doc Brown originally wants to travel to, so that all fits.  But that picture on Elberfeld's BR, along with the height, weight and general career stats are extremely Ecksteinish.  The other possibility is that some kids from San Dimas were doing a history report, using a time machine from the future, and accidentally captured Elberfeld from 1898 and brought him to 2001 to become Eckstein - a name the made up based on the San Dimas kids overuse of the word "excellent".  That's my theory anyway.)

Here's the "tale of the icepacks" comparison of Quentin and Pierre vs Fielder and Weeks in 2010: