The title of this post is a quote often attributed to Jarrod Dyson, the lightning quick fourth outfielder for the Kansas City Royals during their 2014 and 2015 pennant runs.
Watching those two teams was probably the most fun I’ve ever had following baseball. Sure, a large part of that was watching my longtime favorite team contend for and win a championship after twenty-plus years of embarrassing futility. That kind of turnaround is bound to get the juices flowing. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it rejuvenated my love for baseball.
But I think I would have been sucked in by those Royals teams even if I hadn’t been rooting for them since I was six years old. They were a true throwback, an organization that defied the current trends and frustrated the experts, and they played a style of ball that six-year-old me would have immediately recognized.
Buoyed by obscenely powerful arms and an ever increasing reliance on advanced stats, baseball has been gradually evolving into its present form for decades, though the transformation seems to have gone into overdrive over the last five years or so.
Pitchers are more dominant than ever. Strikeouts are at an all-time high. Batting averages are at an all-time low. The “Three True Outcomes” approach (Home run, walk, or strikeout) has been widely embraced. And sadly, the stolen base has fallen out of fashion.
This is where the game was trending in 2014-15, but the Royals refused to play along. They didn’t draw many walks, but they didn’t strike out much either. They were middle of the pack hitting the ball over the wall, but they made consistent contact and put the ball in play, straining opposing defenses and putting players on base.
And when they got on base, they ran. Dyson, often sent in to pinch run late in games, evoked memories of past Royals speedsters like Willie Wilson and Lonnie Smith with his ability to rattle pitchers and manufacture scoring opportunities.
Nor were they just adept at stealing bases. They excelled in all aspects of the running game. Every hitter in the lineup, with the possible exception of 2014 DH Billy Butler (aka Country Breakfast), had enough pep in their step to stretch singles into doubles, and doubles into triples. Hell, Alcides Escobar even led off the 2015 World Series with an inside the park home run.
Not to be outdone, look at two of the most iconic moments in the 2015 postseason. Neither involves the ball going over the wall. The first is Eric Hosmer’s mad dash home in the ninth inning of Game 5 of the World Series. He patiently waited off of third base for David Wright to commit to throwing out Salvador Perez at first, and then he made his break.
Mets 1B Lucas Duda had the chance to throw him out at home, but the throw was off, Hosmer scored, and the Royals tied the game. They eventually won the game and the series in the twelfth. The running game put pressure on the defense to step up and make a play, and the defense failed.
The other example is from Game 6 of the ALCS. After a forty-five minute rain delay in a 3-3 ballgame, Lorenzo Cain walked. The Royals put on a hit and run, Cain went on contact, and Hosmer singled to right field.
Knowing that Blue Jays RF Jose Bautista had a habit of lazily throwing the ball into second on hits like Hosmer’s, Cain used his head start to go from first to home, scoring the winning run and clinching a World Series berth for Kansas City. Bautista didn’t know what hit him.
In other words, that’s what speed do.
It’s a lesson that modern baseball seems to have forgotten, despite the Royals’ best efforts to remind them. Favoring a more conservative approach, the stolen base is generally viewed with no small amount of disdain. The consensus seems to be that a swiped bag is not worth the risk of an unnecessary out.
To illustrate this point, let me run a few numbers by you.
In 2022, the league average for team stolen bases was 83. The Rangers led the majors with 128, and Minnesota brought up the rear with 38. Jon Berti of the Marlins led all individual players with 41 steals.
As I hinted at earlier, the numbers from 2015 are more or less in line with 2022. The league average was 84. Cincinnati led the league with 134, Baltimore was last with 44, and Kansas City ranked fifth with 104. Dee Gordon, another Marlin, was the individual leader with 58.
Go back just another five years to 2010, however, and the numbers start to tick up. The league average was 99 in 2010. Tampa Bay was the leader with 172, and the Cubs and Giants tied for last with 55. Juan Pierre was the individual stolen base king with 68.
And if we narrow our gaze to the period celebrated by this blog, 1985-93— 1994 is not included because it was not a full season— it quickly becomes apparent how much more vital the stolen base used to be.
From 1985-93, the league average for team stolen bases ranged from 117 to a high of 138 in 1987. The 1989 Brewers led the majors with 165 stolen bases, by far the lowest total accumulated by a league leader during that span, and the only time the league leader failed to steal at least 220 bases.
The St. Louis Cardinals set the high water mark with a phenomenal 314 stolen bases in 1985. It is the second highest total since the deadball era, eclipsed by only the 1976 Oakland A’s, who stole 341 bases.
This was hardly out of the ordinary for the Cardinals. They led MLB in stolen bases every year from 1985 to 1988. Their lowest total during that span was 234. This was Whiteyball operating on all cylinders.
No, Whiteyball was not some racist throwback to segregation days. It was a style of play named after Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog, designed to capitalize on speed. Herzog’s teams placed less of an emphasis on power hitting and instead focused on putting the ball in play, high on-base percentages, defense, and of course, stolen bases.
Their opponent in the 1985 World Series, the Kansas City Royals, utilized a similar approach. This shouldn’t have been too surprising, since many of their players were holdovers from Herzog’s previous tenure as Royals manager. Kansas City also played in a cavernous ballpark that didn’t reward power and was covered in Astroturf. The fake grass was unforgiving on players’ bodies, but undeniably conducive to heightened speed.
Despite the outcome of the 1985 World Series, no one ran quite like the Cardinals. Almost their entire lineup could move, including 1985 NL MVP Willie McGee, Andy Van Slyke, and Terry Pendleton. But the cream of the crop was undoubtedly Vince Coleman.
Several players come to mind when I think about the great base thieves of my youth. Naturally, Willie Wilson immediately springs to the forefront. I’ve written about Wilson’s significance to me personally, but he also ranks eleventh all-time in steals with 668.
Tim Raines, arguably the greatest Expo ever, ranks fourth with 808. Kenny Lofton, who helped turn around Cleveland in the 90’s from the leadoff spot, is fifteenth with 622. Another Cardinal great of the era, Ozzie Smith, currently sits at twenty-two with 580.
But there are two players who stand above everyone else in this discussion. One is Coleman, who ranks sixth on the all-time stolen base list with 752. And the other is the undisputed king of stolen bases, the American legend himself, Rickey Henderson. Rickey finished with 1,406 stolen bases, nearly five hundred more than Lou Brock in second place.
In the period in question (1985-94), Henderson led the AL in stolen bases seven times. (Over the course of his entire career, which stretched from 1979-2003, Rickey actually led the AL in steals twelve times.) Coleman led the NL six times. Yet, other than their blazing speed, the two men were remarkably different.
Here’s a quick comparison of their career stats.
Head to head, it’s easy to see that Coleman was a really nice player with exceptional speed and running ability. Rickey, however, was a first ballot Hall of Famer for a reason. Similar to Bo Jackson and Babe Ruth, Henderson had a mythic aura surrounding his combination of talent and larger-than-life personality.
Ironically, given his outsized persona, Rickey usually felt overlooked and underappreciated during his prime. I’ll admit that I was initially seduced by the big bats and tape measure home runs from the Bash Brothers (Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco) when I first started gravitating toward the Oakland Athletics in the late 80’s. I wasn’t the only one, and Rickey felt this keenly.
He was the best player on those Oakland teams. They didn’t get over the hump and win a World Series until he got there in 1989. He won the ALCS MVP that year, and followed it up by winning the AL MVP in 1990. Check out his 1990 stats:
.325/.439/.577, 28 HR, 61 RBI, 119 R, 33 Doubles, 3 Triples, 65 SB, 1.016 OPS, 189 OPS+
This statline is proof that he was far from a one-trick pony. He wasn’t just holding the bat for show, hoping to get on base somehow so he could unleash his speed like an old school Terrance Gore. Rickey could do it all.
He batted right-handed, despite the fact that he was a lefty, mainly because that’s how he saw other kids doing it when he first learned to play. His stance was a low crouch that drove opposing pitchers nuts, and he resisted persistent efforts from hitting coaches to mess with it. His confidence paid off, resulting in three thousand hits and a record 81 leadoff home runs, among other accolades.
Throughout his tremendously successful career, Henderson generally got a bad rap from the world-at-large. He was an eccentric character without a doubt. He never spent his per diem on the road. Instead, he kept the envelopes of cash and let his kids pick one when they did well in school. He also once framed a one million dollar signing bonus check and hung it on the wall instead of cashing it.
He caught a lot of crap for referring to himself in the third person as “Rickey,” but this was largely overblown. He tended to talk to himself at the plate and at other times of high stress, but his critics acted like he always talked that way.
Upon setting the record for career stolen bases, he called himself “the greatest” in a speech inspired by his boyhood hero, Muhammad Ali. Of course, his critics jumped all over him for being arrogant and disrespecting Lou Brock.
People always seemed to want to take Henderson down a peg, but most of the Rickey bashing is just noise. Look up the story about an oblivious Rickey telling John Olerud that he had once played with another guy who wore a batting helmet in the field, not realizing that he was talking about a previous stint with Olerud himself.
It’s a funny story. It’s just not true. The same goes for another famous anecdote about Rickey misunderstanding the definition of tenure. It even goes beyond that.
I once worked at a casino with a guy who claimed to have punked Henderson at the craps table in Atlantic City. He called Rickey an asshole and said it was a pleasure to take his money. Maybe it happened. But I have a hard time believing that guy could have gotten the better of Rickey in anything in the real world.
The truth is, Rickey Henderson embodies so much of what is great about baseball. He’s the type of player that kids should emulate. He’s a successful husband and father. And sure, he might have been jealous of the fame and money being thrown at sluggers, but unlike Barry Bonds and many others, he didn’t corrupt himself into becoming one of them.
He pushed himself even harder to excel at the multitude of other things he did well in the game, and ultimately crafted a career that outshines them all. He won two world championships along the way and accomplished amazing feats to fill a record book of his own.
Henderson is the only player in AL history to steal 100+ bases in a single season three times. (1980, 82, and 83.)
In 1982, he set the individual single season stolen base record with 130.
He became the first player to hit 20 HR and steal 80 bases in a season in 1985. He did it again in 1986, and so did Eric Davis. They’re the only two players to ever do it, and Rickey is the only one to do it twice.
Of all his records, he is most proud of his 2,295 runs. You have to score runs to win games, and he scored more than anyone else. Not a bad feather in his cap.
Despite his mixed reputation, he played for over two decades and was usually seen as a positive force in the clubhouse during his many stops. He even won NL Comeback Player of the Year with the Mets in 1999.
Perhaps most appropriately, he insisted that the A’s make his bobblehead’s uniform dirty when they honored him in 2011. If his uniform wasn’t dirty, he didn’t feel like he was really playing the game. It’s hard to think of a better testimony for him than that.
Vince Coleman, on the other hand, was in many ways the head case that Rickey’s critics accused him of being. His career was plagued by several real controversies, not the kind of exaggerated and usually false nonsense that followed Henderson.
He offended Jackie Robinson’s widow, among many others, when he irritably remarked that he didn’t know anything about Robinson at a press conference during the 1985 World Series.
After landing with the Mets in 1991, he faced a sexual assault charge and was convicted on separate charges of setting off firecrackers and injuring three autograph-seeking kids in the Dodgers Stadium parking lot.
By that time, Coleman’s career was on the downward slope— a much steeper slope than Henderson’s. He played twelve years, which is not a bad run, but only a fraction of Rickey’s. Outside of a solid stint in a part-time role with the 1994 Royals, and a playoff appearance on Seattle’s bench in 1995, the 90’s were not particularly eventful for Coleman.
The 80’s were a different story altogether. He burst onto the scene in 1985 and won the NL Rookie of the Year award. He is the first and only player to steal 100+ bases in each of his first three seasons. (He and Rickey are the only two players to do it three times, and he’s the only one to do it three years in a row.)
In 1989, he stole fifty straight bases without being caught, the longest streak ever. To date, he’s the last person to steal 100 bases in a season. A two-time All-Star, his overall skills might have paled in comparison to someone like Rickey, but he occasionally flashed something beyond his speed. For example, he was the first outfielder to throw out two runners at home in a single World Series game, accomplishing the feat in Game 7 of the 1987 Fall Classic.
Still, speed is what set Vince Coleman apart, and regardless of what he might have lacked in other areas, speed made him a potent weapon on the diamond. Case in point, there’s a great story about how Coleman affected pitchers.
After safely getting on base, Coleman took his lead. Montreal pitcher Dave Palmer was so worried about him on the basepaths, he threw over to first nineteen times in a row to try and pick him off. 19 times! And then, after all that, when he finally did throw a pitch, Coleman stole second anyway.
Again, that’s what speed do.
Unfortunately, that’s something baseball seems to have forgotten. In a sign of things to come, Coleman tried to catch on with the Cardinals for one last comeback in 1998. Tony LaRussa ultimately passed him over for Brian Hunter, who he felt would provide more pop. In LaRussa’s mind, and baseball as a whole, that was more valuable than speed.
I’m cautiously optimistic that the new rule changes coming in 2023 will lead to a renaissance for the running game. Baseball needs more action, and few plays get the blood pumping like a stolen base attempt. I’m confident Rickey would agree with me.
Henderson battled injuries in 1987, and it was the only year between 1980-91 (over a decade!) that he didn’t lead the American League in stolen bases. Harold Reynolds (Seattle) led the AL that year with 60.
Reynolds got a phone call from Rickey after the season. He expected Rickey to congratulate him, but Henderson lit into him instead. “Sixty stolen bases? You oughta be ashamed. Rickey would have sixty by the break!” And then he hung up.
I almost feel bad for Reynolds. Not only does he have to live with being thrown out by Bo Jackson on one of the greatest defensive highlights in MLB history, but he also got chewed out by Rickey Henderson for winning a stolen base title. Guy can’t catch a break.
That said, maybe Rickey should start making calls all around the majors. After all, there’s still plenty of speed in the game. Perhaps they just need some proper motivation.
Someone needs to remind them what speed do.
Thank you for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Do you miss the stolen base as much as I do? Who was your favorite MLB base thief? Leave a comment below, and please share with your seamhead friends!