Nobody takes a hint less well than Rich Hill, and conversely nobody proves prevailing wisdom wrong more often than Rich Hill. With this in mind, we can again say one of the best-loved and certainly most frequently repeated sentences in contemporary baseball: Rich Hill is BACK!
His generic name aside, Rich Hill has been eased out of more throwing-related major league jobs than anyone this side of Josh Johnson, though in fairness this is Hill’s 24th year in professional baseball, and he is 45 years old. But when he signed a minor league deal with the injury-ravaged Kansas City Royals, it just felt right. When he pitched his first game for the Royals' Arizona Complex League team Tuesday against the Chicago Cubs' representatives, it went swimmingly: four innings, 12 hitters, 12 outs, seven strikeouts. There is more work to be done, but go ahead and say it: Rich Hill is totally BACK!
Dealing in the desert.45-year-old Rich Hill retires all 12 batters he faces, striking out 7, in his @Kansas City Royals organizational debut! Every single ACL Cubs hitter he faced was not born when Hill was drafted by Chicago in 2002. #RaisingRoyals👑
— Raising Royals (@raisingroyals.bsky.social) 2025-05-21T01:59:00.083Z
And with the additional news that Kansas City starters Seth Lugo (middle finger) and Cole Ragans (groin) have gone on the injured list, it doesn't take much imagination to see a near future in which Rich Hill is SO BACK!
When Hill is called up—and he will be because God Herself is clearly willing this—the Royals will become his 14th big-league team, to go along with 22 minor league teams with nicknames like Lugnuts, Diamond Jaxx, RailRiders, and Sea Dogs. When that day occurs, Hill will tie Johnson and Edwin Jackson (MLB) for the most big league employers, one ahead of Ish Smith (NBA) and two ahead of Mike Sillinger (NHL). And if the Royals find they cannot use him after Lugo and Ragans return, as they surely will, Hill will have to hope that the results he puts up will convince one of the teams he has not yet played for (Arizona, Atlanta, the Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati, Colorado, Detroit, Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Minnesota, Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco, Texas, Toronto, and Washington) that they need to announce that Rich Hill is SO BACK AGAIN!
Indeed, Rich Hill should never not be BACK! Certainly not until the Rockies sign him and do not only a bobblehead of him in a Colorado uniform—he'll just have to cope with that shame on his own—but a 15-headed bobblehead with all the caps of all the teams ever to give fans the chance to emit the battle cry that Rich Hill is BACK! Even among the most aggressively weirdo bobblehead collectors, that unholy totem would be worth the flight to Denver. Just get on the end of the line of 170,000 others willing to degrade themselves enough to buy a ticket and receive a 35-pound Cerberus-on-steroids bobblehead to watch the rest of the Rockies because they know that some things—which, again, in this case, is Rich Hill being BACK!—are more important than the home team winning.
The only thing Hill will not be able to do is catch the all-time leader in teams played for in a career. That record belongs to recently retired but still very active Uruguayan soccer player Sebastian Abreu, nicknamed El Loco (swear to god), who is only three years older than Hill but played for 32 separate teams in his 26-year career, including 12 loans and the Uruguayan national team. He has also managed seven others, including his current gig with Xolos of Tijuana in Liga MX. The whole resume is here and seems almost cartoonish; even the 33rd team, which we’ve elected not to count because it is the noxious Beitar Jerusalem, was eliminated from the list only because Abreu apparently didn't get paid, and so never played. Abreu, again seriously, also hosted the Uruguayan version of Deal or No Deal because he needed something to fill his afternoons. It’s no shade on Hill to slot in just behind someone who ran out of teams to play for and subsequently pivoted to becoming his country’s version of Howie Mandel.
But Hill is doing what he can with the limited employers before him. Baseball would have to expand by four teams for him to catch Arias; he has a better chance of getting to hold a skinny mic on a crypto version of The $100,000 Pyramid reboot on Game Show Network. In fairness, though, you would be a fool to eliminate Hill from contention there. Once you have known the exhilaration of being BACK!, you want to feel it forever.
