- Apr 1, 2008
- 20,580
- 15,180
Dope
Congrats to Kluber and the Yanks
It’s still only May
Congrats to Kluber and the Yanks
It’s still only May
2024 MLB Thread; RIP Willie Mays & Pete Rose. Dodgers win #8!
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by CP1708,
- Start date
- Feb 23, 2010
- 23,518
- 26,668
This is wild
HIM
Supporter
- May 10, 2006
- 27,788
- 65,454
this is gonna be the worst offensive season ever 
- Jun 14, 2006
- 29,423
- 11,648
- Nov 26, 2015
- 24,441
- 22,120
The no hitter is the new triple double.
- Jun 1, 2011
- 107,128
- 79,616
- Apr 23, 2014
- 44,764
- 17,078
Feel like I’ve seen famous Dex on every page since the Season kicked off
- May 10, 2013
- 23,164
- 30,051
Only when a certain team wins. He’s pretty silent otherwise.
- May 11, 2010
- 8,955
- 4,919
Im glad for Kluber.
Funny and upsetting that the last Yankee no-hitter was thrown by a former Met (David Cone).
With Cole and now Kluber wanting Higgy to be their personal catcher, I feel like its only a matter of time before Sanchez is traded.
Funny and upsetting that the last Yankee no-hitter was thrown by a former Met (David Cone).
With Cole and now Kluber wanting Higgy to be their personal catcher, I feel like its only a matter of time before Sanchez is traded.
- Apr 23, 2014
- 44,764
- 17,078
They have to trade Sanchez.
I know they want it to be "sexier" around there with him in the mix but, he just doesn't do enough with his bat to make sense.
- Jul 14, 2003
- 7,860
- 4,910
The major league batting average is now .236
Seattle is batting .198
Seattle is batting .198
- Oct 3, 2007
- 21,954
- 13,057
A no-no is great nonetheless but batters can’t hit nowadays so that definitely helps.
- Oct 25, 2006
- 12,176
- 13,337
Stark: How much base stealing is too much? With experimental rules, Class A games are ‘like watching a track meet’
By Jayson Stark 3h ago
By Jayson Stark 3h ago
In places like Boston and Baltimore, Houston and St. Louis, the good old-fashioned stolen base stopped being a thing back in the waning years of the late, great 20th century. It was somewhere around when Vince Coleman retired, right?
We mention that because at the current pace, there will be 1,000 fewer bases stolen in the big leagues this year than there were 10 years ago. Yep. A thousand. And that seems like something you should know as you read this piece.
But you should also know that the deep thinkers in this sport are trying to do something about that. So all of a sudden, in places like Fayetteville and Fresno, Aberdeen and Hillsboro, the stolen base is anything but dead. In fact, in the Class A orbit of the minor leagues this season, the rate of stolen bases per game is up an eyeball-popping 75 percent since the last minor-league season in 2019.
So why should that matter to anyone who cares about the future of baseball, major-league edition? Because that minor-league base-stealing explosion is not just something that welled up accidentally, because a bunch of fast dudes felt like running a lot. It happened because those ever-inquisitive baseball scientists, back in the MLB lab, wanted it to happen.
Specifically, it happened because of two new rules that were dropped on all six Class A leagues this season as an experiment – an experiment in using rule tweaks to inject more action into the sport. So we’re here to look at those experiments and wonder if they could ever show up in a big-league ballpark near your zip code. But we’re also here to ask a major question:
How much base stealing is too much?
The reason to ask that question is because one of these rules – requiring pitchers to step off the rubber before they throw to any base (more details shortly) – has already been tried out, in the second half of the Atlantic League season two years ago. Here is what happened:
In other words, with the arrival of just that rule, the average Atlantic League team was suddenly trying to steal almost two bases every game. That’s nearly three times the rate of stolen bases being attempted by the average big-league team these days (0.61 per game).
“It was like watching a track meet some nights,” Mark Mason, manager of the York Revolution, told The Athletic. “It really was.”
Just as an entertainment spectacle, that theoretically might be more fun than watching the current big-league product, where the greatest athletes ever to play baseball spend a lot of time stuck on first base, hoping the next hitter pops one into the second deck so they can all trot home. But…
Would it be too much fun? Would it be too much base stealing? Would it even feel like baseball at all?
These are fascinating thoughts to ruminate on. We’ll get back to them in a moment. But first…
Those new rules
Just so you know what you’re dealing with, here are the two rules that arrived in those six A-ball leagues two weeks ago:
High-A: It’s a little late for baseball to outlaw Andy Pettitte and Kenny Rogers. So in the High-A leagues, they’re doing the next-best thing: Outlawing the legendary quasi-balk pickoff move that those guys and their left-handed cohorts have employed for a century – by requiring all pitchers to step off the rubber before throwing to first base or any other base.
What happens if they don’t step off? It’s a balk. Of course, we could find a few thousand baserunners who would say that it’s always been a balk, but let’s not go down that road.
Low-A: In the lower levels of Class A, pitchers are now on the quota system. Gone are the glory days when they could throw over to first base seven times – or 17 times – and wear a runner down. The new rule gives pitchers only two “free” pickoff throws to first (or any) base.
Now in order to prevent, say, 35-foot leads after the first two moves, the rule still permits pitchers to throw over a third time. But if they do, the runner needs to be out. If not, it’s a balk. Oh, and if the pitcher even steps off the rubber, that also counts. So one throw to first and one step off, and those quota buzzers will be sounding (not literally).
“High” maintenance
So what kind of impact has that stepoff rule in High-A had so far? Let’s just say the 4×100 relay race is on – every night. Because stolen bases per game are up 77 percent compared with 2019. Sure, it’s just a couple of weeks. But even that small sample is a staggering sample.
And what makes this data so interesting is that it mirrors the impact of this same rule in the Atlantic League two years ago. In the first half of that season, the league used the current big-league rule. Then, halfway through the schedule, it switched to Operation Stepoff. Take a look at the way that changed the base-stealing philosophies of these five teams:
But stolen bases only tell part of the story. The key figure was stolen-base attempts. Those Long Island Ducks tried to steal second approximately 20 percent of the time any runner reached first in the second half. The Somerset Patriots sent the runner on first an incredible 21.5 percent of the time. Those are huge, essentially unprecedented numbers – at least in modern big-league times.
Across the league, that figure averaged out to one SB attempt every 17.5 percent of the time a runner made it to first. In the first half, it was a mere 10.8 percent. That’s a jump of 62 percent.
So how does that compare to the brand of baseball you watch on TV every night? Ha. It doesn’t even look like the same sport. In the big leagues this season, the rate of attempts per times on first base is only 6.7 percent. That’s the lowest in almost six decades (since 1964).
But there isn’t any time in major-league history, since baseball began tracking all stolen-base attempts about a century ago, when the rate even remotely resembled what ensued in the Atlantic League in 2019. Even back in 1987, when Whitey Herzog’s “Runnin’ Redbirds” were swiping 248 bases and the sportwide stolen-base craze was at its highest level in the last 100 years, the rate of SB attempts per times on first came to only 12.4 percent.
So there is literally no one alive who has seen the level of base-stealing frenzy that ensued in the Atlantic League two years ago – or in the High-A minor leagues in the first two weeks of this season.
“The baserunners took full advantage,” Mason said. “As soon as the left-hander picks his front foot up, you’re off to the races – because at that point, he cannot pick (you off) anymore. But that was the whole point. The whole point was more offense, more action, more base stealing, more offense in general.
“You had certain guys that always tried to steal. Like Darian Sanford, who played for the Barnstormers (and stole 74 bases). If he got on first base, in two pitches it was a triple….But it wasn’t just the speedsters that were running. Once that rule was in effect, it was anybody could run it all.”
So is that what America is clamoring for in the big leagues?
“It changes the way you play the game,” Mason said. “It does….It definitely opens the game up. And I know (the people at MLB) have talked to the fans, and they’ve done all kinds of surveys. And people say they love to see triples and base-stealing. They want to see that action.”
The “low” down
Meanwhile, in the Low-A leagues, it isn’t just the left-handed portion of the pitching populace that is having to re-learn the art of holding runners. That two-pickoff limit affects everybody. And it’s having exactly the type of impact you would anticipate.
So just adding that pickoff quota to the mix has inspired the average Low-A team to attempt 43 percent more stolen bases per game. And again, let’s remind you that in the big leagues, we haven’t seen teams stealing bases at this rate since the 19th century.
“It definitely brings another element of excitement for the fan,” St. Lucie Mets manager Reid Brignac told The Athletic. “And for the players, it’s exciting. I mean, who doesn’t love to watch a guy swipe second base and then score within the next couple of pitches? It keeps the game moving. It’s not just…this guy gets on, he stays at first base, and then he runs on (the) 3-2 (pitch). No. This is adding a lot more excitement for the fans.”
But it also adds a whole new level of aggressive managerial strategizing. So in just the first four games of this season, Brignac flashed so many green lights that 10 different players on his roster stole a base.
They’ve slowed that pace since. But with a roster loaded with team speed, he has consciously tried to use the pickoff quota to max advantage. And that starts, he said, with trying to lure the pitcher to throw over as soon as possible so the sprinting can begin.
“I like for my guys to get an increased lead off the first get-go,” Brignac said, “like as soon as they come set, to try and entice that pick-over, and get that first one out the way early. So now we know that they really only have one (move) left in their back pocket. So then it’s like, maybe get another step, maybe another step and a half, and then we’re looking to go and put pressure on the defense.”
Brignac is only five years removed from playing nine seasons in the big leagues. He spent five of those seasons with a Rays team that pumped the gas pedal on the running game any time Carl Crawford and B.J. Upton got on base. But when asked if he would like to see this rule in the big leagues, Brignac hesitated.
If the idea is simply to inject more action into the average game, “I believe this works,” he said. But to transport this level of base-stealing fury to the big leagues, it’s more complicated than that. Reid Brignac knows it because he’s lived it.
“I’d still like to see it over the course of the year,” he said, “just because it’s different…And especially at the major-league level, it’s hard to start putting new rules in baseball at that level, because guys are not always open to such different changes. Here, they don’t have a choice, right? It gets implemented and they have to do it.”
But in the big leagues, players will have a choice, right there at the bargaining table. And guess what? This could even be a tough sell to the sort of player who would figure to benefit most…
The base stealer
You might think a two-time stolen-base champ would be popping the Moet Chandon over the possibility that new off-to-the-races rules could be on their way to the major leagues. Um, guess again.
“All this stuff, I’m not a fan of,” Royals super-utility wizard Whit Merrifield told The Athletic. “In my opinion, it’s just promoting laziness. It’s taking away the art of base-stealing and just saying, `OK, if you’re fast, you’ll be able to steal bases.’”
Merrifield ranked 61st in the big leagues last year on Statcast’s average sprint speed leader board. He still wound up tied for second in the American League in stolen bases. He also led the league in 2017 and 2018, and he’s first again this year. So he’s human proof that stealing bases in the big leagues isn’t about sprint times. It’s about will, effort and preparation.
“I spend probably an hour every night and then another 15 to 30 minutes on the day of the game watching videos,” he said, “to find the keys and tendencies (of pitchers) and figuring out good times to run.… And the reason stealing bases is going down is because guys don’t want to do that anymore. They’d rather worry about hitting home runs.”
Oh, he’s all for a version of this sport that features more base-swiping and less launch-angle talk. But he made it clear, with pretty much every word he spoke, that he has no interest in accomplishing that with rules that wipe out the artistry of stealing.
“It would be like going and telling the NFL, `You can’t disguise coverages. You can’t show a blitz. You can’t set up in man (coverage) and switch to zone,’” Merrifield said. “It would take away what makes the great quarterbacks great, being able to diagnose that. And same with base-stealing….
“(Then) there’s no skill to it,” he went on, his voice rising noticeably. “The only skill is: ‘Are you fast? Yeah, you’re fast. OK, you can steal bases.’ Like I said, I might be biased just because I’m not that straight up burner … But there’s such an art to it that it’s just taking that away. And I think there’s other ways to encourage guys to steal.”
We started to explain the new Low-A rule, which would put a cap on how many times a pitcher could throw to first base. He shook his head before we could even finish and said, “That’s just ridiculous.”
He brought up his teammate, Adalberto Mondesi Jr., one of the fastest humans in baseball, then imagined Mondesi in a world with that rule in place.
“If he got on (first) base with nobody in front of him…that’s 100 bags, no problem, for a guy like Mondi,” he said. “And that’s just steals of second. And then he could steal third. I mean, we’re talking 150 bags without even thinking. Wow.”
Merrifield said he would have less of an issue with the High-A rule that forces left-handers to step off before throwing to first – “because I mean, really, if a left-hander has a slide step, it’s really hard to steal anyway, because he’s looking at you, right?”
But if a pure base stealer like him has minimal interest in either of these innovations, what are the odds of convincing the players’ union, as a group, that this is the ticket to reviving the fast-fading art of stealing bases?
“I just think: Will it solve the problem? Maybe,” Whit Merrifield said. “There’s some logic to what they’re thinking. I just think it’s a lazy way to go about it. And I just don’t agree with it, frankly.”
So does it feel as though that’s the essence of this entire issue? The goal is cool. There’s logic behind the experiment. But maybe it’s time to ask…
How much is “too much?”
All right, let’s all agree on one basic principle. Who among us wants less action in the average baseball game? That would be absolutely nobody. Agreed? Great.
So the idea of infusing more action feels like a cause we can all get behind in some way, shape or form. But here comes the complicated part: How much more action are we honestly looking for? And is the version of baseball we’ve seen in the Atlantic League in 2019 – and now at the lower levels of minor-league baseball in 2021 – a version worth dreaming on?
Wait. Don’t answer that yet. Let’s first do the math. Check out the rate of base stealing these new rules have inspired – and the last time we’ve seen anything approximating that style of baseball in the major leagues:
So is that what we’re looking for – a style of baseball last played by Wee Willie Keeler and Hughie Jennings?
Just a few weeks ago, we asked a similar question of Theo Epstein when he appeared on the Starkville edition of The Athletic Baseball Show (Apple/Spotify).
The minor-league season hadn’t begun yet at the time. So we laid out the Atlantic League’s numbers from 2019 and asked: Is that what he would expect to happen if the same step-off rules were applied in the big leagues?
He didn’t dispute the math. But he did make an important point: “The baseline of stolen-base attempts was higher in the Atlantic League” before they adopted this rule. Very true.
So if base-stealing attempts increased in the big leagues at the same rate they’ve increased in the minor leagues, the average team would be attempting somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.05 steals per game – a rate last seen in the major leagues in 1997. And if that’s where this is leading, you can find lots of people in front offices around the game who are good with that.
“You know, there is a natural ebb and flow to the game of baseball, and there has been for 100 years,” said the Twins’ president of baseball operations, Derek Falvey. “But I do think there are some specific things that can be put in place that might accelerate those changes. And this sounds like one of them.”
So Falvey is like many great front-office minds we’ve talked to – open-minded and curious about these rules and others but not certain yet whether he wants to see any of them actually put in place.
“I would say I put myself in the category of someone who wants to talk about all these things,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to implement them all right now, and that’s OK. But I think trying some of these, particularly at the minor-league level and in some of these partner independent leagues, to really see what happens, I just don’t see a lot of downside in that. I see a lot of potential.”
But can anyone be sure that if either of these rules showed up in the big leagues in the next couple of years, the results would resemble what we’ve seen in the Atlantic League or the minor leagues? That’s a monumental concern.
“I think we’d see players absolutely run wild,” said another AL exec, who asked not to be named. “We’d go from one extreme to the other. And that’s not what we’re attempting to do. We may see something that’s far more extreme than what we intended.”
Very possible. In the Atlantic League, stolen-base success rates went from 75.5 percent under the old rules to 80.9 percent once the stepoff rule was in place. And if big-league teams knew they could double their stolen-base totals and get thrown out less than 20 percent of the time, who knows where this might lead?
“It’s simple,” said a third AL exec who asked to remain anonymous. “Creating incentives to steal bags is a matter of increasing stolen-base success percentages, because right now the incentive to do it is not very high.”
But Epstein likes to make other points about the benefits of base stealing that no one ever talks about – namely, the ripple effects this could have on both hitters and pitchers. How, for instance, would pitchers react in a world in which base-stealing became a major factor again?
“They’re gonna quick-pitch,” Epstein said on Starkville. “They’re gonna slidestep and all that. I mean, I can see it coming … And maybe throw more fastballs. And that’s good, to create the outcomes fans like to see – triples, doubles and stolen bases – like how big leaguers used to pitch.”
And there’s also this: If a runner reaches first and has a relatively easy path into scoring position, that has the potential to create a totally different universe than today’s game, where that runner reaches first and doesn’t budge.
Why do teams build their offensive approach around the home run now? Because the odds of getting three singles in an inning off Jacob deGrom or Shane Bieber are microscopic. But if all it takes to score a run is a walk, a steal and one single, maybe that changes swing planes and a million other things.
Except how can the architects of baseball’s future know they’ll see that? They can’t – unless they test it, study it and then talk about it long and hard.
“I think it’s really valuable (to experiment), but then have a conversation,” Falvey said. “Implementing requires a whole ‘nother layer of scrutiny, because if we totally transformed the game in a way that we didn’t intend, there are unintended consequences for every change. And I just think that we should be always talking about that and thinking about it, and then recognizing what those are and being able to adapt when we learn something new about it.”
So let’s do more than just add up those mushrooming stolen-base numbers in the minor leagues and think we’ve learned something. Let’s also listen to the players, coaches and managers who have lived with it – because they’re the ones who can help us tell the future.
So let’s listen one more time, to Reid Brignac. He’s mostly a fan (so far) of the rule in his league – which limits the number of pickoff throws. But be wary, he says, of that Atlantic League/High-A stepoff rule, because we’re already seeing where that might be leading.
“If you do that (in the big leagues), it’s just gonna be a free-for-all,” he said, “and it’s gonna be nonstop. And I don’t think that’s what we want, either. So I think there’s still a fine line that we need to pay attention to – of what’s acceptable and what’s gonna be a little too much?”
We mention that because at the current pace, there will be 1,000 fewer bases stolen in the big leagues this year than there were 10 years ago. Yep. A thousand. And that seems like something you should know as you read this piece.
But you should also know that the deep thinkers in this sport are trying to do something about that. So all of a sudden, in places like Fayetteville and Fresno, Aberdeen and Hillsboro, the stolen base is anything but dead. In fact, in the Class A orbit of the minor leagues this season, the rate of stolen bases per game is up an eyeball-popping 75 percent since the last minor-league season in 2019.
So why should that matter to anyone who cares about the future of baseball, major-league edition? Because that minor-league base-stealing explosion is not just something that welled up accidentally, because a bunch of fast dudes felt like running a lot. It happened because those ever-inquisitive baseball scientists, back in the MLB lab, wanted it to happen.
Specifically, it happened because of two new rules that were dropped on all six Class A leagues this season as an experiment – an experiment in using rule tweaks to inject more action into the sport. So we’re here to look at those experiments and wonder if they could ever show up in a big-league ballpark near your zip code. But we’re also here to ask a major question:
How much base stealing is too much?
The reason to ask that question is because one of these rules – requiring pitchers to step off the rubber before they throw to any base (more details shortly) – has already been tried out, in the second half of the Atlantic League season two years ago. Here is what happened:
In other words, with the arrival of just that rule, the average Atlantic League team was suddenly trying to steal almost two bases every game. That’s nearly three times the rate of stolen bases being attempted by the average big-league team these days (0.61 per game).
“It was like watching a track meet some nights,” Mark Mason, manager of the York Revolution, told The Athletic. “It really was.”
Just as an entertainment spectacle, that theoretically might be more fun than watching the current big-league product, where the greatest athletes ever to play baseball spend a lot of time stuck on first base, hoping the next hitter pops one into the second deck so they can all trot home. But…
Would it be too much fun? Would it be too much base stealing? Would it even feel like baseball at all?
These are fascinating thoughts to ruminate on. We’ll get back to them in a moment. But first…
Those new rules
Just so you know what you’re dealing with, here are the two rules that arrived in those six A-ball leagues two weeks ago:
High-A: It’s a little late for baseball to outlaw Andy Pettitte and Kenny Rogers. So in the High-A leagues, they’re doing the next-best thing: Outlawing the legendary quasi-balk pickoff move that those guys and their left-handed cohorts have employed for a century – by requiring all pitchers to step off the rubber before throwing to first base or any other base.
What happens if they don’t step off? It’s a balk. Of course, we could find a few thousand baserunners who would say that it’s always been a balk, but let’s not go down that road.
Low-A: In the lower levels of Class A, pitchers are now on the quota system. Gone are the glory days when they could throw over to first base seven times – or 17 times – and wear a runner down. The new rule gives pitchers only two “free” pickoff throws to first (or any) base.
Now in order to prevent, say, 35-foot leads after the first two moves, the rule still permits pitchers to throw over a third time. But if they do, the runner needs to be out. If not, it’s a balk. Oh, and if the pitcher even steps off the rubber, that also counts. So one throw to first and one step off, and those quota buzzers will be sounding (not literally).
“High” maintenance
So what kind of impact has that stepoff rule in High-A had so far? Let’s just say the 4×100 relay race is on – every night. Because stolen bases per game are up 77 percent compared with 2019. Sure, it’s just a couple of weeks. But even that small sample is a staggering sample.
And what makes this data so interesting is that it mirrors the impact of this same rule in the Atlantic League two years ago. In the first half of that season, the league used the current big-league rule. Then, halfway through the schedule, it switched to Operation Stepoff. Take a look at the way that changed the base-stealing philosophies of these five teams:
But stolen bases only tell part of the story. The key figure was stolen-base attempts. Those Long Island Ducks tried to steal second approximately 20 percent of the time any runner reached first in the second half. The Somerset Patriots sent the runner on first an incredible 21.5 percent of the time. Those are huge, essentially unprecedented numbers – at least in modern big-league times.
Across the league, that figure averaged out to one SB attempt every 17.5 percent of the time a runner made it to first. In the first half, it was a mere 10.8 percent. That’s a jump of 62 percent.
So how does that compare to the brand of baseball you watch on TV every night? Ha. It doesn’t even look like the same sport. In the big leagues this season, the rate of attempts per times on first base is only 6.7 percent. That’s the lowest in almost six decades (since 1964).
But there isn’t any time in major-league history, since baseball began tracking all stolen-base attempts about a century ago, when the rate even remotely resembled what ensued in the Atlantic League in 2019. Even back in 1987, when Whitey Herzog’s “Runnin’ Redbirds” were swiping 248 bases and the sportwide stolen-base craze was at its highest level in the last 100 years, the rate of SB attempts per times on first came to only 12.4 percent.
So there is literally no one alive who has seen the level of base-stealing frenzy that ensued in the Atlantic League two years ago – or in the High-A minor leagues in the first two weeks of this season.
“The baserunners took full advantage,” Mason said. “As soon as the left-hander picks his front foot up, you’re off to the races – because at that point, he cannot pick (you off) anymore. But that was the whole point. The whole point was more offense, more action, more base stealing, more offense in general.
“You had certain guys that always tried to steal. Like Darian Sanford, who played for the Barnstormers (and stole 74 bases). If he got on first base, in two pitches it was a triple….But it wasn’t just the speedsters that were running. Once that rule was in effect, it was anybody could run it all.”
So is that what America is clamoring for in the big leagues?
“It changes the way you play the game,” Mason said. “It does….It definitely opens the game up. And I know (the people at MLB) have talked to the fans, and they’ve done all kinds of surveys. And people say they love to see triples and base-stealing. They want to see that action.”
The “low” down
Meanwhile, in the Low-A leagues, it isn’t just the left-handed portion of the pitching populace that is having to re-learn the art of holding runners. That two-pickoff limit affects everybody. And it’s having exactly the type of impact you would anticipate.
So just adding that pickoff quota to the mix has inspired the average Low-A team to attempt 43 percent more stolen bases per game. And again, let’s remind you that in the big leagues, we haven’t seen teams stealing bases at this rate since the 19th century.
“It definitely brings another element of excitement for the fan,” St. Lucie Mets manager Reid Brignac told The Athletic. “And for the players, it’s exciting. I mean, who doesn’t love to watch a guy swipe second base and then score within the next couple of pitches? It keeps the game moving. It’s not just…this guy gets on, he stays at first base, and then he runs on (the) 3-2 (pitch). No. This is adding a lot more excitement for the fans.”
But it also adds a whole new level of aggressive managerial strategizing. So in just the first four games of this season, Brignac flashed so many green lights that 10 different players on his roster stole a base.
They’ve slowed that pace since. But with a roster loaded with team speed, he has consciously tried to use the pickoff quota to max advantage. And that starts, he said, with trying to lure the pitcher to throw over as soon as possible so the sprinting can begin.
“I like for my guys to get an increased lead off the first get-go,” Brignac said, “like as soon as they come set, to try and entice that pick-over, and get that first one out the way early. So now we know that they really only have one (move) left in their back pocket. So then it’s like, maybe get another step, maybe another step and a half, and then we’re looking to go and put pressure on the defense.”
Brignac is only five years removed from playing nine seasons in the big leagues. He spent five of those seasons with a Rays team that pumped the gas pedal on the running game any time Carl Crawford and B.J. Upton got on base. But when asked if he would like to see this rule in the big leagues, Brignac hesitated.
If the idea is simply to inject more action into the average game, “I believe this works,” he said. But to transport this level of base-stealing fury to the big leagues, it’s more complicated than that. Reid Brignac knows it because he’s lived it.
“I’d still like to see it over the course of the year,” he said, “just because it’s different…And especially at the major-league level, it’s hard to start putting new rules in baseball at that level, because guys are not always open to such different changes. Here, they don’t have a choice, right? It gets implemented and they have to do it.”
But in the big leagues, players will have a choice, right there at the bargaining table. And guess what? This could even be a tough sell to the sort of player who would figure to benefit most…
The base stealer
You might think a two-time stolen-base champ would be popping the Moet Chandon over the possibility that new off-to-the-races rules could be on their way to the major leagues. Um, guess again.
“All this stuff, I’m not a fan of,” Royals super-utility wizard Whit Merrifield told The Athletic. “In my opinion, it’s just promoting laziness. It’s taking away the art of base-stealing and just saying, `OK, if you’re fast, you’ll be able to steal bases.’”
Merrifield ranked 61st in the big leagues last year on Statcast’s average sprint speed leader board. He still wound up tied for second in the American League in stolen bases. He also led the league in 2017 and 2018, and he’s first again this year. So he’s human proof that stealing bases in the big leagues isn’t about sprint times. It’s about will, effort and preparation.
“I spend probably an hour every night and then another 15 to 30 minutes on the day of the game watching videos,” he said, “to find the keys and tendencies (of pitchers) and figuring out good times to run.… And the reason stealing bases is going down is because guys don’t want to do that anymore. They’d rather worry about hitting home runs.”
Oh, he’s all for a version of this sport that features more base-swiping and less launch-angle talk. But he made it clear, with pretty much every word he spoke, that he has no interest in accomplishing that with rules that wipe out the artistry of stealing.
“It would be like going and telling the NFL, `You can’t disguise coverages. You can’t show a blitz. You can’t set up in man (coverage) and switch to zone,’” Merrifield said. “It would take away what makes the great quarterbacks great, being able to diagnose that. And same with base-stealing….
“(Then) there’s no skill to it,” he went on, his voice rising noticeably. “The only skill is: ‘Are you fast? Yeah, you’re fast. OK, you can steal bases.’ Like I said, I might be biased just because I’m not that straight up burner … But there’s such an art to it that it’s just taking that away. And I think there’s other ways to encourage guys to steal.”
We started to explain the new Low-A rule, which would put a cap on how many times a pitcher could throw to first base. He shook his head before we could even finish and said, “That’s just ridiculous.”
He brought up his teammate, Adalberto Mondesi Jr., one of the fastest humans in baseball, then imagined Mondesi in a world with that rule in place.
“If he got on (first) base with nobody in front of him…that’s 100 bags, no problem, for a guy like Mondi,” he said. “And that’s just steals of second. And then he could steal third. I mean, we’re talking 150 bags without even thinking. Wow.”
Merrifield said he would have less of an issue with the High-A rule that forces left-handers to step off before throwing to first – “because I mean, really, if a left-hander has a slide step, it’s really hard to steal anyway, because he’s looking at you, right?”
But if a pure base stealer like him has minimal interest in either of these innovations, what are the odds of convincing the players’ union, as a group, that this is the ticket to reviving the fast-fading art of stealing bases?
“I just think: Will it solve the problem? Maybe,” Whit Merrifield said. “There’s some logic to what they’re thinking. I just think it’s a lazy way to go about it. And I just don’t agree with it, frankly.”
So does it feel as though that’s the essence of this entire issue? The goal is cool. There’s logic behind the experiment. But maybe it’s time to ask…
How much is “too much?”
All right, let’s all agree on one basic principle. Who among us wants less action in the average baseball game? That would be absolutely nobody. Agreed? Great.
So the idea of infusing more action feels like a cause we can all get behind in some way, shape or form. But here comes the complicated part: How much more action are we honestly looking for? And is the version of baseball we’ve seen in the Atlantic League in 2019 – and now at the lower levels of minor-league baseball in 2021 – a version worth dreaming on?
Wait. Don’t answer that yet. Let’s first do the math. Check out the rate of base stealing these new rules have inspired – and the last time we’ve seen anything approximating that style of baseball in the major leagues:
So is that what we’re looking for – a style of baseball last played by Wee Willie Keeler and Hughie Jennings?
Just a few weeks ago, we asked a similar question of Theo Epstein when he appeared on the Starkville edition of The Athletic Baseball Show (Apple/Spotify).
The minor-league season hadn’t begun yet at the time. So we laid out the Atlantic League’s numbers from 2019 and asked: Is that what he would expect to happen if the same step-off rules were applied in the big leagues?
He didn’t dispute the math. But he did make an important point: “The baseline of stolen-base attempts was higher in the Atlantic League” before they adopted this rule. Very true.
So if base-stealing attempts increased in the big leagues at the same rate they’ve increased in the minor leagues, the average team would be attempting somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.05 steals per game – a rate last seen in the major leagues in 1997. And if that’s where this is leading, you can find lots of people in front offices around the game who are good with that.
“You know, there is a natural ebb and flow to the game of baseball, and there has been for 100 years,” said the Twins’ president of baseball operations, Derek Falvey. “But I do think there are some specific things that can be put in place that might accelerate those changes. And this sounds like one of them.”
So Falvey is like many great front-office minds we’ve talked to – open-minded and curious about these rules and others but not certain yet whether he wants to see any of them actually put in place.
“I would say I put myself in the category of someone who wants to talk about all these things,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to implement them all right now, and that’s OK. But I think trying some of these, particularly at the minor-league level and in some of these partner independent leagues, to really see what happens, I just don’t see a lot of downside in that. I see a lot of potential.”
But can anyone be sure that if either of these rules showed up in the big leagues in the next couple of years, the results would resemble what we’ve seen in the Atlantic League or the minor leagues? That’s a monumental concern.
“I think we’d see players absolutely run wild,” said another AL exec, who asked not to be named. “We’d go from one extreme to the other. And that’s not what we’re attempting to do. We may see something that’s far more extreme than what we intended.”
Very possible. In the Atlantic League, stolen-base success rates went from 75.5 percent under the old rules to 80.9 percent once the stepoff rule was in place. And if big-league teams knew they could double their stolen-base totals and get thrown out less than 20 percent of the time, who knows where this might lead?
“It’s simple,” said a third AL exec who asked to remain anonymous. “Creating incentives to steal bags is a matter of increasing stolen-base success percentages, because right now the incentive to do it is not very high.”
But Epstein likes to make other points about the benefits of base stealing that no one ever talks about – namely, the ripple effects this could have on both hitters and pitchers. How, for instance, would pitchers react in a world in which base-stealing became a major factor again?
“They’re gonna quick-pitch,” Epstein said on Starkville. “They’re gonna slidestep and all that. I mean, I can see it coming … And maybe throw more fastballs. And that’s good, to create the outcomes fans like to see – triples, doubles and stolen bases – like how big leaguers used to pitch.”
And there’s also this: If a runner reaches first and has a relatively easy path into scoring position, that has the potential to create a totally different universe than today’s game, where that runner reaches first and doesn’t budge.
Why do teams build their offensive approach around the home run now? Because the odds of getting three singles in an inning off Jacob deGrom or Shane Bieber are microscopic. But if all it takes to score a run is a walk, a steal and one single, maybe that changes swing planes and a million other things.
Except how can the architects of baseball’s future know they’ll see that? They can’t – unless they test it, study it and then talk about it long and hard.
“I think it’s really valuable (to experiment), but then have a conversation,” Falvey said. “Implementing requires a whole ‘nother layer of scrutiny, because if we totally transformed the game in a way that we didn’t intend, there are unintended consequences for every change. And I just think that we should be always talking about that and thinking about it, and then recognizing what those are and being able to adapt when we learn something new about it.”
So let’s do more than just add up those mushrooming stolen-base numbers in the minor leagues and think we’ve learned something. Let’s also listen to the players, coaches and managers who have lived with it – because they’re the ones who can help us tell the future.
So let’s listen one more time, to Reid Brignac. He’s mostly a fan (so far) of the rule in his league – which limits the number of pickoff throws. But be wary, he says, of that Atlantic League/High-A stepoff rule, because we’re already seeing where that might be leading.
“If you do that (in the big leagues), it’s just gonna be a free-for-all,” he said, “and it’s gonna be nonstop. And I don’t think that’s what we want, either. So I think there’s still a fine line that we need to pay attention to – of what’s acceptable and what’s gonna be a little too much?”
- Jun 7, 2008
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Kluber has been great this season. Had a few great games.
Hitters are trash, no longer care about strikeouts and just want to hit a HR. Drives me crazy how often I see a shift and no one laying a bunt. Can’t we just go back to trying to get on base, get a good hit or bunt? What the **** do the managers even do anymore?
Hitters are trash, no longer care about strikeouts and just want to hit a HR. Drives me crazy how often I see a shift and no one laying a bunt. Can’t we just go back to trying to get on base, get a good hit or bunt? What the **** do the managers even do anymore?
- Jan 3, 2011
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Looking forward to the series against SF, feels like it's been forever since they played against each other. Going to be dope with fans back in the picture 
- Jan 3, 2011
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The Padres weakest link:
Can't believe he's getting paid $8.9 and thankfully it's his last year on his contract.
I have faith AJ Preller will make a move by the trade deadline for a upgrade.
Can't believe he's getting paid $8.9 and thankfully it's his last year on his contract.
I have faith AJ Preller will make a move by the trade deadline for a upgrade.
- Apr 20, 2021
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Threw his career and life away. What a sicko.
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Former Pirates Pitcher Felipe Vazquez Found Guilty Of Sexual Assault Of 13-Year-Old Girl
Former Pirates pitcher Felipe Vazquez has been found guilty on several charges.
www.google.com
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JD's raking
- May 2, 2012
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Big series for the Yanks against CHW incoming.
- Jul 22, 2012
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Ballpark should be live tonight. 10k allowed inside and Bauer is pitching. Should be fun to watch.Looking forward to the series against SF, feels like it's been forever since they played against each other. Going to be dope with fans back in the picture
- Jan 3, 2011
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elpablo21
Supporter
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Threw his career and life away. What a sicko.
Former Pirates Pitcher Felipe Vazquez Found Guilty Of Sexual Assault Of 13-Year-Old Girl
Former Pirates pitcher Felipe Vazquez has been found guilty on several charges.
scust
- Jun 7, 2008
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anybody been to a colorado rockies game? headed out there next week and they have $7 tickets in the picnic area. seeing if you can actually see the game from there.
