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Wednesday, August 13, 2003
mailbag
aziz from atlanta writes in about stolen bases:
Beltran is the closest I’ve found to 40-50 a year with 90% success. He’s never had 40, though he probably will this year. For his career he’s at 88% (139 out of 148).
Tony Womack had 3 straight years of 85% or higher, with 58, 60 and 72 steals in those 3 years. But he can’t get on base for shit, even then. His best year of those 3 was a .332.
Rickey Henderson was 81% for his career.
Also, if you look at all time base stealer stats, you notice something very strange. Either the rules were different way back when, or the stats keepers didn’t track caught stealings very well. Some of these are completely absurd: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/alltime/leaders?breakdown=2&type=0&sort=12&year=0
There are multiple guys with 6, 7, 8 or 900 steals with under 20 caught stealings.. All of them old-timers. What’s up with that?
good stuff, aziz. but it should be "rickey henderson is 81% . . .". he's still active!
the reason for the old-timer steals weirdness is they didn't used to count caught steallings. there probably were a lot in those days. people ran all the time.
Damn, I was hoping it was something cooler like: "Back in the day, when a runner wanted to steal a base he could tackle the 2nd or 3rd baseman in an attempt to knock the ball out of his glove. If that didn't work, he had 5 seconds to beat the crap out of the infielder."
ha!
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