Nick Mingione is excited. Very excited.And it’s not because his team had just won a key Southeastern Conference series against Tennessee to bolster its NCAA Tournament resume. Nope. It’s because he’s about to talk about one of his favorite plays in baseball: the hit by pitch.“You picked one of my most passionate things. I’ve been here 10 years, and no one has asked me about this,” said Mingione, Kentucky’s veteran coach.“We have a saying: ‘We don’t move!’ So for me, when I say, we don’t move, there’s times in life, literally, you can’t flinch. You’ve got to hold your ground. And you’ve got to stand for what you believe in.”Mingione’s team stands for what it believes in more than just about any program in college baseball. Since the start of the 2025 season, Kentucky batters have been hit by a pitch on 6.21 percent of their plate appearances (275 total HBPs), the highest rate in the nation.“We teach it,” he said. “We practice it. There is an art to getting hit.”And more players are getting hit across the sport of college baseball. In 2019, HBPs occurred on 2.57 percent of plate appearances. That has increased every season since and is now at 3.50 percent in 2026 heading into the weekend.