Notes and Essays, Week Ending 1/10

1/4 N1: Baseball Reference will be hearing from me because if you go to “batting leaders” for any league that isn’t MLB, the normal star label that marks a left-hander is applied in a way that is misleading. I was at first confused, so I ended up checking Japan and a couple of MLB-affiliated minor leagues, and players are only given stars if they hit and throw left-handed. Since it is batting stats we are looking at, I’ll take the liberty of saying that is wrong, and it is the procedure for “MLB standard batting” and any team box of batting, even for any team outside MLB, to have the star denote any left-handed hitter, regardless of his throwing hand. To give you the impact of the error, of players with at least 10 MLB plate appearances last year, there were 150 “bats left, throws right” guys, compared to just 69 “bats left, throws left” guys.

Switch-hitters among batting leaders are also not marked.

There are so few “throws left, bats right” guys that it would require some ingenuity to check, but I suppose the hand defaults to the throwing hand when there is a conflict. I can’t imagine why Baseball Reference couldn’t just change the default, but if there is some hurdle I am not understanding, the least that can be done is to have an explanation above the list.

To make absolutely clear where this information is that is wrong, say you are interested in Mets’ 2024 first-rounder Carson Benge and want perspective on his performance in the South Atlantic League last year. You first go to his page and find his corresponding line of data. If you want to put his .302 average in perspective, you can find the league average was .225 by clicking on SALL and looking at League Batting. But you can’t actually seee individual hitters in the league, one versus another, unless you click on “batting leaders” to the right of “League Batting,” That gives great information, but the hand data is off.

1/4 N2: An expatriate who had a good year in Japan in 2025 was Luke Voit. He posted a .300/.384/.498 slash for Rakuten in the pitcher-friendly conditions. Just 67 games, though. He played some first base as well as DHing. It was his first year playing in Japan.

An expat who did not have a good year in Japan was Trevor Bauer. The Central League WHIP was 1.201, and his was 1.369, or 14% higher. So, in a league where the average guy gave up 100 hits and walked 33 in 100 innings, Bauer’s numbers would be 114 hits and 38 walks, maybe. Of pitchers in the league who had 100 innings (143-game schedule), that WHIP placed him 18th of 22. Perhaps a pitcher could get by with a below-average WHIP if his home run rate was low, but that wasn’t the case with Bauer: his 1.01-per-9 was only exceeded by one pitcher with 100 innings.

Both Voit and Bauer will be 35 within a couple of months.

1/5: Only two players in big league history, both pitchers, had at least 500 at-bats and only one extra-base hit. The first was a guy named Ned Garvin (not to be confused with the 38.8 bWAR mid-20th century pitcher Ned Garver), whose nine-year career exactly straddled 1900. The second was Johnny Cueto, who batted 545 times. So Cueto has the record for the lowest extra-base hit percentage of any player with 500 AB. He did hit 53 singles, and led the National League in sacrifice hits in 2012, as well as tying for 2nd in the NL in sacrifice hits in 2014 and 2016.

Sixteen other players, all primary pitchers, have had 500+ AB and an XBH rate under 1 percent. Willie Mitchell was once in the starting lineup and batting 3rd as the center fielder, though, only to have Sam Crawford pinch hit for him in the top of the 1st, and Cobb then go in and play center field for Crawford. (Wonder what was going on there?) A 6/27/1917 double header game that was rescheduled after rain.

Of the < 1% XBH guys, four did hit a home run. From lowest to highest batting average: Preacher Roe (1938-1954), Togie Pittinger (1900-1907), Gerry Staley (1947-1961), and Slim Harriss (1920-1928).

I suppose this line of research was inspired by the Bartolo Colon home run. Colon would fit right in with his career .084 average (of the 18 pitchers, only Dean Chance, .066, was worse), but Colon had 5 XBH in 299 AB, probably suggesting it takes some bad luck to make this list as well as ineptitude. In other words, I don’t think anyone could really sustain at these levels with enough at-bats.

The Roe home run came on 7/7/53 against the Pirates’ Bob Hall at Forbes Field. Appears to have left the yard.

Roe is part of a pattern on this list of left-handed pitchers who didn’t just hit left-handed, which would be the normal thing to do. In Roe’s case, and in those of Mitchell and Max Lanier, they hit right-handed. Mickey Lolich, Jim O’Toole, and Fred Norman switch-hit. I would explain the presence of Roe, Mitchell, and Lanier as maybe guys who were hitting from the wrong side and thus didn’t have any pop. But as the left-handed pitching switch-hitters would have for the most part been hitting from their dominant side, I don’t know why that seems to be a thing as well on this list.

Five players in MLB history, again all pitchers, had 300+ AB without an extra-base hit. Jim DeShaies leads with 373 AB, followed by Virgil Barnes, Barry Zito, Frank Castillo (who drowned in 2013 at age 44), and Pat Zachry. Their batting averages ranged from .088 to .113.

DeShaies had 186 SO, 373 AB. So one at-bat of making contact saved him from exactly a 50% strikeout rate.

He is matched pretty much point by point by Mike Bielecki, a journeyman who did go 18-7 with a 3.14 E.R.A. for the 1989 division-winning Cubs. Bielecki batted 282 times without an extra-base hit, hit just .078, and had a SO ratio to AB of .511.

Not all the SO rates of the super-low XBH guys are of that magnitude, even of the players who played fairly recently. Castillo, for instance, had just 111 strikeouts in 338 at-bats.

1/6 N1: Buried in one of my notes was that pitcher George Uhle led the 1923 Indians offensively in one of their 17-4 wins, going 4 for 4 with three doubles and a walk. There was more where that came from. Winning 200 games on the nose, Uhle had plenty of opportunity to bat, and he hit .289 for his career, representing as well in the OBP (.339) and SLG categories (.384).

When he was going well and was healthy early in his career, Uhle could be a tremendous workhorse. He threw 357.2 innings in 1923, 41 more than anyone else in the AL. Having an excellent year at the plate, hitting .366, the combination meant that he had 50 hits in his capacity as a pitcher, which “Baseball Reference Splits” has as the all-time record (2nd, Carl Mays, 48, 1921; 3rd, Wes Ferrell, 40, 1935). He is officially credited with two more hits than that, and since the Indians didn’t really start using him as a pinch hitter until the next season, 52 was probably his true total as a pitcher.

He regularly pinch hit for the rest of his career, with five seasons in the 24-31 pinch hitting appearance range. A valuable pitcher, he was never used at another position.

One is left wondering what might have been, because Uhle was succeeded in Cleveland for a span of five years by Wes Ferrell. Ferrell was from some angles a better pitcher than Uhle (he won 20+ games six times from 1929-1936, and only Lefty Grove won more in the majors during that time), but he was definitely an even better hitter than Uhle. He featured power, slugging .446 for his career, and topping Uhle in home runs, 38-9. He had a 100 OPS+, Uhle an 86, although the offensive bWAR for the two (11.3 and 10.6) is barely in Ferrell’s favor.

But it really is true that Ferrell joined the rotation when Uhle left for Detroit, and they weren’t traded for each other. Although Ferrell was the better hitter, I believe the Indian staffs that Uhle was on are actually the ones that set a lot of offensive records for pitchers. I was researching a post on that a couple of years ago, but never could find the time to organize it.

Except for 13 games as a left fielder in September of 1933 when his pitching season was over, Ferrell was also confined to hitting merely as a pitcher and to pinch hitting. With a .622 OPS over his career, almost 200 points under his OPS as a pitcher, he had little luck as a pinch hitter, also only hitting 1 home run in 139 AB.

1/6 N2: Uhle hit three doubles in that big game he and the Indians had in 1923, so I guessed his 10 on the season might be the record, particularly since he has the overall hit record. But three pitchers have done better. Some guys have all the luck and rightly excite jealousy; Smoky Joe Wood, 1912, with 13 doubles as well as everything else he did that season (34-5 and WS Championship) is one of those guys. As you probably know, when his arm was beyond repair from all his premature smoke, he became an outfielder, overlapping on the Indians with Uhle.

This list of most doubles in a season turned out to have some diagnostic ability to spot future position players. Or at least it found Babe Ruth. Ruth was going both ways when he hit 9 doubles as a pitcher in 1918, but 9 doubles in just 82 pitching at-bats when he was a true Babe in 1915 (along with an overall OPS+ of 189) showed something was not right with this guy. If Ruth’s hitting snuck up on you (and I don’t think for many it did), you weren’t paying attention, clearly.

Robin Roberts’ career offensive slash (.167/.238/.226) is something you might skip over, but in 1955 as a hitter, when he was 28 and a year past his peak four-year run on the mound, he gets the creativity award for his offensive stats. A .263 batting average as a pitcher doesn’t deserve historical citation, but in 95 AB, he had 9 2B, 3 3B, 1 HR, and 16 walks. So he had a .358 secondary average.

1/7 N1: Jeff Torborg was the Mets manager for 1992 and for the beginning of 1993, and if you read my “June 4, 1992” post, you know I had a high opinion of him as a person. But man, 78 career runs scored in 1525 career plate appearances? Tom Seaver had 99 in 1552 plate appearances. The personification of the backup catcher, I guess, Torborg never had more than 284 plate appearances (in his last season, strangely) and eight of his 10 seasons with PAs in the 100s. Ten seasons makes for ready math, so he averaged 7.8 runs in 155.2 plate appearances, and that is really what his seasons look like, taking them one by one. His runs look like Joe Sewell’s annual strikeouts.

Fittingly, he had his toughest time in 1968, posting a .161/.212/.183 slash, and scoring just twice in 100 plate appearances. He didn’t score a run until August 24, which was the 27th game of the season in which he batted. Catching Drysdale, he went 3 for 4 against the Giants’ Ray Sadecki.

Torborg stole 3 bases over his career and had a .268 OBP — which, I’ll grant, doesn’t seem to put him in unique company. His 6.8% walk rate wasn’t too bad, although it does fall to 4.9% without intentional walks.

1/7 N2: In working from lists of left-handed-throwing position players yesterday, I noticed how bereft they were of superstars. We can find amazing left-handed pitchers without too much trouble, and I thought it would have been even easier to find their counterparts among left-handed-throwing position players, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

I did notice that Juan Soto was on these lists, and he satisfies just about everybody’s idea of a superstar. So I was thinking that maybe that should be examined — namely, if Soto should be recognized as the one-and-only really great left-handed thrower among position players today. Not that it means much; he’s not worth more to the Mets because he plays right field left-handed. It’s akin to the switch-hitting lists I decry, and even without the 5% merit there probably is to those. But the prevalance or dearth of left-handed throwers, as the case be, is sort of interesting on a macro level, apart from player evaluation.

Anyway, without cheating and looking at Soto’s record, I decided 6.5 bWAR might be the mark of a great season. Soto has actually had seasons of 7.9, 7.3, 6.2, 5.5, 5.3, and 5.1. So he’s had only two 6.5 bWAR seasons. But among active left-handed-throwing positions players, no one else has done that, has had multiple 6.5 bWAR seasons. The only other 6.5 bWAR seasons posted by active left-handers have come courtesy of Cody Bellinger and Jason Heyward (as for Heyward, a player sometimes doesn’t play for seasons on end before he is officially retired).

Trying to find out how I could fill in the sentence, “Juan Soto is the best left-handed-throwing position player since?,” I looked at 6.5 bWAR seasons for players debuting in 1995 or later. Also with 2 were Adrian Gonzalez, Grady Sizemore, and Lance Berkman. Todd Helton had 3. That’s it, unless we want to get to the single-season guys

If we expand to right-handed throwers, Helton’s three 6.5 bWAR seasons would have him just 15th of players debuting after 1995, and of course he is actually in a big tie for 15th with his 3. Right-handers with 4 or more 6.5 bWAR seasons, starting with the most: Albert Pujols, Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Joey Votto, Robinson Cano, Chase Utley, Andruw Jones, Nomar Garciaparra, Aaron Judge, Jose Ramirez, Josh Donaldson, Miguel Cabrera, Adrian Beltre, and Carlos Beltran. Helton is tied with ten right-handers with his three 6.5 bWAR seasons, which means that 25 of the 26 highest-rated players by this method threw right-handed.

In all, there were 197 6.5 bWAR seasons produced by RH, 23 produced by LH. That’s an 8.6 ratio. In the piece I did yesterday, I found a 6.9-1 general ratio between RH/LH. So, for what it’s worth, left-handed throwers had a lower hit rate of great seasons.

Is there any other good reason for that? Really, meaning any bias? As I understand it, the WAR system of positional adjustments is supposed to equalize all positions, but it could be that this equalization doesn’t in practice extend to the best seasons. That it ends up restricting range at the hitters’ position where left-handers typically play, in other words, even if the average at those positions is the same. Center fielders, however, of which there can be left-handed throwers, would not be disadvantaged.

A more straightforward approach to the question of, “Soto is the best left-handed-throwing position player since ?” just looks at total WAR. Soto has 42.6 bWAR currently. Doing that in 1096 games (or 6.8 seasons/162 g) is one thing, but doing it before his 27th birthday is even more impressive.

Among left-handers debuting in 1975 or later, the bWAR scoreboard, with debut year, looks like

(1) Barry Bonds 162.8, 1986

(2) Rickey Henderson 111.2, 1979

(3) Ken Griffey Jr. 83.8, 1989

(4) Rafael Palmeiro 71.9, 1986

So it’s very reasonable to think Soto is on track to be the best left-handed position player since Griffey Jr. Soto debuted in 2018. So you could say he was maybe the best to come along in about 30 years.

I ran the experiment comparing left-handers and right-handers number of 6.5 bWAR seasons using 1964-1994 as a first season. To start with left-handers, this did not introduce any new names at the top: Bonds had 14 such seasons, Griffey Jr. 7, Henderson 6. What was striking was that they were the only players with more than 3, putting me very much in the mode of the study of the most recent 30 years. And only two lefties had three seasons of 6.5 bWAR: Kenny Lofton, and Reggie Jackson.

The right-handed list was led by Mike Schmidt with 10, and by Alex Rodriguez with 10 (is this the third base high bWAR bias again?) Then the highest number dropped off to 6 seasons, which was Wade Boggs (third base!) and Cal Ripken Jr.

So, while Bonds certainly did his part, and acknowledging their huge population disadvantage, the left-handers again seem to have gotten their clocks cleaned. But when I totaled the 6.5+ seasons up, it was a lot more even: 205 seasons for right-handers, 59 for left-handers. That’s a 3.5 ratio.

My question was how much of this different result reflected a difference in the proportions, and how much in the hit rate by player? So I reprised my study from yesterday’s post, and using 500 career plate appearances of non-pitchers as the requirement, I compiled the respective counts by throwing hand for different periods.

Using debut season, the 1995-2025 period had a 6.5-1 ratio of right-handers to left-handers, the 1964-1994 period a 6.0 ratio. So, if this is right and without a bias of any import, left-handers have gotten a bit more rare, but not anything like to the degree that their percentage of the best seasons has declined.

One thing in these data didn’t quite add up, though, which was that I’d found yesterday a 6.9-1 ratio using 2005-2025. So that made me wonder if one of the two ratios I’d found was wrong, or if 1995-2004’s ratio was just lower than 2005-2025 to a degree that it could lower the whole ratio from 6.9 to 6.5.

I found 1995-2004 to have a 5.8 RH/LH ratio. Offhand, that fit with the data and meant that what I found for the two different if overlapping periods was plausible. Perhaps more interesting, breaking down 2005-2025 itself and adding this to the picture, it seems there has been a strong trend of a move toward even more right-handers.

Classifying by ~10-year period of debut season:

1995-2004: 5.8 RH/LH

2005-2014: 6.4 RH/LH

2015-2025: 7.5 RH/LH

Note that 1995-2004 actually had a higher percentage of left-handers than the 1964-1994 debut period, when the ratio was 6.0-1. So the trend doesn’t seem to be a continual drop in the left-handed percentage since 1964, although that whole 30 years would have to be broken down. But in the last 30 years, if this study is sound, there have been more and more right-handers.

There are two possible biases to consider. First, this Baseball Reference search will pull in the occasional pitcher with a long career who also pinch-hit. A higher percentage of pitchers than position players are left-handed, so that skews the results towards left-handers. Now we have the universal DH, so there isn’t that element, and even before it was dropped, pitchers with 500 career PA were becoming less and less frequent. But I am almost certain these bad data are too infrequent to be moving the numbers much. But to be absolutely sure, I’d have to comb the data of them.

I suppose this next one isn’t really a bias; it could be something actually worth noting. But maybe right-handed throwers have gone up because teams carry fewer outfielders and first basemen relative to the other positions. Teams certainly carry fewer bench players, going with pitchers instead. The composition of the bench could also have changed. But I can’t say that this kind of move from outfielders/first basemen to infielders and catchers stands out to me as a trend.

1/8: Ted Williams had five seasons in which he walked at least once a game. Throwing out the 19th century, and requiring 50 games so as to eliminate DH-era pitchers (Blake Snell did it twice!), there have only been 12 other such seasons by everyone altogether. Yet you look at Williams with his 2021 walks in 2292 games (0.882/G) and you think over 19 seasons, he might have done it even more often than that.

Bonds, who is the all-time walks leader, had 0.857 walks/game. He seemed not quite as good a candidate for 1.00 BB/G seasons, though, since he goosed his rate in the time he solved/cracked baseball and was accumulating so many intentional walks. He had the same five 1.00 BB/G seasons as Williams. But I was overlooking that he had 21 50+ game seasons to Williams’ 17, and that his overall career rate was maybe weighted down in his early years (it wasn’t until his sixth season that he walked 100 times) as much as its ascent was accelerated later.

Also with a walk/game in a season: Ruth (twice), Eddie Joost, Mantle, Jack Clark and McGwire.

There is one other player who did, and I didn’t know him, so I thought would highlight him: Henry Kimbo. In 1948, the last year of the Negro Leagues, he walked 59 times in 59 games. Over his career, he clearly had a very good walk rate, but I don’t know if he quite rated as a walk specialist. As much just a good player. 1948 was Kimbo’s 12th year. Of Negro League players who began in 1930 or later, he is credited with the fifth-most plate appearances. He made five All-Star teams, and again restricting to players beginning in 1930 and after, had the third most walks, behind Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson. If anything better with age rather than slowed, he swept the slash categories in the National League in 1947 (.385/.447/.619) and had a 188 OPS+ that year.

1/9 N1: Did you know that in 2021, Tarik Skubal gave up 35 home runs in 149.1 innings? That was officially his rookie season, granting the vagaries of COVID disruption (he joined the Tigers rotation 8/18/20).

1/9 N2: An oddity in Jon Heyman’s NY Post report today, as he says “the Yankees liked [Tatsuya Imai] as a reliever.” Imai signed with the Astros. About a month ago, I cited his five complete games last season.

1/9 N3: The Yankees reportedly just signed Fernando Cruz (whom they have under team control but was eligible for arbitration) for 1.45 million. He’d get a lot more than that on the open market, multiples of that. Seems unfair at age 35 that he can’t be a free agent, even if he doesn’t have six years service time.

1/9 N4: According to Baseball Reference’s seasonal averages, the highest rate ever for Sacrifice Flies/Game, rounded to the hundredths, is a tie between 1954 and 1993, at 0.32. What is interesting about this is that 1954 was the first year SF were kept as a separate category. That it then also ties for the highest rate seems like a strange coincidence, if it is one; the next two years saw precipitous drops (by the standards of this thing) to 0.28 and then to 0.26.

The variables that would seem to matter for this would be number of times per game with a runner on third and less than two out, contact rate, and fly ball percentage. Last year the SF rate was 0.27, and the last time it had been that high was 2010. Strikeouts were down last year, and fly balls continue to go up, so seeing an increase in the data makes sense.

1/9 N5: In looking at Joe Sewell’s splits by base situation in 1923 and 1924, I noticed that his sacrifice flies are given there, even though sacrifice flies were not officially kept until 1954. I went through the splits of players like Wagner, Crawford, Gehrig, Ott, DiMaggio, and Mantle, boned up on SF/SH scoring, and pieced things together to get the rhyme and reason behind when Retrosheet records sacrifice flies. I don’t know if you are interested, but it can actually come in handy to understand this data and be able to access it when it is available.

First, there is no unofficial sacrifice fly data on anyone before 1912, but the issue runs deeper. There is no data on anyone for RISP performance or anything like that, either. “Bases Occupied” as a split doesn’t come aboard until 1912.

A sacrifice fly counted as a sacrifice hit starting in 1908, so once Retrosheet is compiling by base situation in 1912, they make the effort to break out the sacrifice flies and sacrifice bunts for us. However, to get them, you can’t go to the summary line of splits at the top; you have to go down to the “Men On” line.

Once sacrifice flies stopped counting as sacrifice hits and just counted as outs (1931-1953, excepting 1939), there is no Retrosheet record of them in the bowels anymore. This is technically a very defensible decision, not to document them. It removes confusion, and allows batting average and slugging average calculations to come out right. But on the other hand, it is an adherence to baseball scoring, not the most detailed possible description of the games that were played. It would be nice to have the information and to be able to recalculate under different scoring rules if one wanted to. Surely, fly balls that scored runs still had extra value, even if they were recorded as outs.

The Retrosheet division is faithful to the rules of the day at all times, I take it. In other words, when from 1926-1930, all advancing fly balls were officially sacrifice hits, regardless of whether they scored runners, Retrosheet is also counting all as sacrifice flies. I believe in all cases, they divvy up the sacrifice hit total they get between hits and flies. Because of no record of some games, incomplete information, or errors on one side or the other, Retrosheet might not have the sacrifice hit total that the official record has. But whatever they have, their hits and flies always adds up to it. But again, to see their work, you have to go to the “Men On” line. specifically.

1/10: Bill Killefer started as a catcher, with just over 1000 games at the position from 1909-1921. In his playing record, one thing that stood out to me is he had a career on-base percentage of just .273. Although he had seven seasons with at least 300 plate appearances, he never walked more than 18 times in a season.

But that is just an aside. What I noticed was a trend during his managerial career, which started basically right after his playing career and consisted of parts of nine seasons with the Cubs and Browns, although only six full ones, as he took over mid-season in his first season with the Cubs, and didn’t finish out his final season with either club. His Cubs teams were over .500 combined but never came within shouting distance of a pennant, while his complete Browns seasons ended with 90, 91, and 91 losses, respectively.

As for the trend….I don’t know if all of his players literally had the stealing green light, but it was something like that. The 1923 Cubs attempted to steal 324 bases, 95 more than the next-highest team in the league, so even a team of Rich Eisens probably would also have had the most steals. I suppose you can say the same about the caught stealing rank being foreordained, and the Cubs cruised to that title as well. Overall, they stole successfully 55.9% of the time, versus the league rate of 55.6%. The Pirates were second in the league in steals, and stole successfully 67.2% (thank you, Max Carey, and your 51-59).

This style of the Cubs was on the edge, I suppose, but if we make an analogy to alcohol, in 1924 the habit got out of control, and the practice became dysfunctional. The Cubs’ stolen base attempts were again far and away most in the league, if down 9% from the year before, but their balance went to 137 SB, 149 CS. The Pirates, with Carey and Cuyler, ran away with the stolen base total (181 SB, 92 CS). No team other than the Cubs was nailed 100+ times.

This is just a little fun note where I do no more than touch the subject, so I haven’t broken down 1925, Killefer’s aborted half season with the Cubs, by manager. But at year’s end, the Cubs had very normal numbers, 94 SB, 70 CS, which is suggestive that he played a role in the statistics.

The trend resumed when Killefer got a shot with the Browns five years later, but you have to look harder to find it. I’m in a dramatic and illustrative mood, so you might think of this stint as like Trump I for its craziness, while Killefer’s Cubs period was like Trump II. Maybe the greater stealing conservatism of the 1930s, and his team’s slowness, served as constraints.

But Killefer continued to see his team run often more than well. For instance, in 1931, they had the worst stolen base percentage in the AL, stealing successfully on just 73 of 153 attempts. In the three full seasons udner Killefer, the team led or tied for the league lead in caught stealing twice, and were tied for second in caught stealing in 1932. Meanwhile, their SB ranks were just 3rd, 4th, and 5th. So other than in 1923, when the Cubs were first in both steals and caught stealing, all five of Killefer’s seasons finished with his team’s having a worse rank in CS than SB.

An incisive look and interesting tool in a time when stolen base percentages probably favored not running at all from a mathematical perspective is Baseball Reference’s “Runs from Baserunning.” That, of course, is not just about stealing, but I thought it might make my point about the incongruence between the attempts and the steals of the Killefer teams.

This theory panned out. Killefer’s teams were last in the league in Rbaser in four of his six full seasons. The only exceptions were 1923, the year of the 181 steals, when they were at -11, in a three-way tie for last, and in 1922, when they came in ahead of the Reds (130 SB, 136 CS for manager Pat Moran of 1919 World Series fame; left fielder Pat Duncan an absurd 12 for 40, but still 2.8 bWAR).

Context could make this study of Killefer’s teams’ steal rates truly interesting. I wonder if maybe he was just a compulsive hit-and-run practitioner? But I would tend to doubt that is the explanation. Players made so much contact in those days, and probably made even more when that was their sole directive. So I don’t think that many caught stealing would result from that. Also, if more hitting and running was the driving force, I don’t think the Cubs would have had as many steals as they had under Killefer, particularly as many as they had in 1923.