Slow Guys Hitting Triples
In the first inning of an Angels-Rangers contest on September 10, 2014, Albert Pujols tripled for 16th time in his career. Over the intervening 3,217 plate appearances since baseball’s slowest player collapsed into third base, he has logged 473 singles, 111 doubles, and 144 home runs, but no more three-baggers. That’s okay; he’s MLB’s active leader in just about every other counting stat. Triples are for fast people. With a “sprint” speed of 22.0 ft/s– nearly a full foot per second slower than Justin Smoak, the next-slowest player– The Machine ceases operation at second base.
The slowest player by sprint speed to record a triple in 2020 was Todd Frazier, who used every bit of his 24.2 ft/s to reach third base. Here’s the video in all its resplendence. The average MLB sprint speed last year was 27.0 ft/s. Frazier was comfortably below that, but hardly immobile. He even stole a base!
Before Statcast could measure sprint speed– and apparently before anyone bought a stopwatch– triples and stolen bases were our two default metrics for speed, and by extension baserunning aptitude. This wasn’t terribly accurate– no baseball card ever revealed how many times a player was gunned down trying to stretch a double, but other than the eye test it was all we had to work with. In theory, if a player is fast enough to leg out a few triples, he ought to be able to steal some bases. There were 885 stolen bases in MLB last season but only 241 triples, making the former 367% more likely than the latter.
However!!! Sometimes a willingness to run hard for 270 feet is more important than pure speed. Two players hoofed out three triples last year without stealing a single base: Asdrúbal Cabrera– a 34-year-old Slow Guy with 24.7 ft/s sprint speed– and Yoán Moncada– who really isn’t that slow at all (27.5 ft/s). If there was a direct correlation between triples and steals, they should have each swiped 11 bases.
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, you might be wondering what is the point of all this. There’s no big reveal or grand conclusion. You won’t learn anything earth-shattering. Beauty and joy is inherent in all baseball weirdness. The value of reading on is merely what you make of it. It’s the goofy glow– subsiding after a millisecond– when you discover Johnny Mize hit 30 triples across two seasons, 1938-1939, without a single stolen base. Johnny Mize was a Slow Guy who just kept running, and 82 years later, we get to unearth a hidden factoid that ever-so-slightly brightens our glowing, even if only for a moment.
There are three active players with more than 50 career triples. Dexter Fowler holds a sizeable lead over Brett Gardner, 82 to 69, while Dee Strange-Gordon’s 54 are even further off the pace. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about their stolen base-to-triple ratios; they have combined for 751 steals to go with their 205 triples. At 3.66:1, they hit the league-wide mark just about on the nose. Fowler, Gardner, and Strange-Gordon are not Slow Guys though, which makes them fun in a different way but not the type of fun we seek here.
Here are some great Slow Guys– all active players with at least 30 career triples, but more triples than stolen bases.
| Slow Guy | Triples | Stolen Bases |
| Brandon Crawford | 38 | 32 |
| Adeiny Hechavarría | 36 | 35 |
| David Peralta | 36 | 30 |
| Nicholas Castellanos | 34 | 11 |
| Eduardo Escobar | 32 | 20 |
| Corey Dickerson | 30 | 24 |
Crawford may be the leader, and long may he reign, but Castellanos steals the show (if little else). It’s not that he doesn’t want to steal bases… he’s just not good at it. He’s been thrown out stealing 16 times in 27 attempts! That’s downright awful! In 2017, his best not-that-Slow-Guy year, he led the American League with 10 triples but was merely 4-9 stealing bases. His sprint speed that year was an above-average 28.1 ft/s, proving that a player who isn’t slow can still be a Slow Guy.
Running the bases is about more than just triples and steals. Fangraphs calculates base running runs above average (BsR), defined as, “number of runs above or below average a player has been worth on the bases, based on stolen bases, caught stealing, extra bases taken, outs on the bases, and avoiding double plays.” So what do they make of an honorary Slow Guy like Castellanos? He was worth -2.1 BsR in 2017 and has a career total of -11.1. Fowler, that triples maven, has 31.4.
Sometimes doing one thing badly can even indicate doing something else quite well. The active leader in caught stealing is Elvis Andrus, who’s been nabbed 105 times to go with his 305 successes– not to mention 48 triples. His career BsR is an outstanding 54.0– substantially higher than Fowler’s! He led the league in caught stealing twice: 2014 and 2017, yet managing a commendable 6.5 BsR in those two years. It turns out the one traditional statistic connected to bad baserunning may actually suggest the opposite.
Here are the active career BsR leaders:
- Brett Gardner, 71.1
- Billy Hamilton, 61.6
- Mike Trout, 60.6
- Elvis Andrus, 54.0
The earlier implication that this article had no point was a lie. The Monty Python-esque conclusion is this: Mike Trout is great. He’s great at everything, including things he probably shouldn’t be. Just look at this beast:
He looks like his second sport should be shotput. He’s virtually tied with Billy Hamilton in BsR whilst listed at 6’2, 235 lb. Say what you will about the accuracy of listed player heights and weights, but he’s nearly identical in alleged size to his lead-footed teammate Albert Pujols (6’3, 235 lb.). He’s also tied with Andrus in the most relevant stat of all, having amassed 48 triples.
Back to September 10, 2014. Right before what will likely be the last triple of Pujols’ illustrious career, Trout was hit by a pitch. Needless to say, he scored on the play, giving the Angels a 1-0 lead in a game they would win, 8-1. No one remembers this game; not really. Undoubtedly, the headlines were about Matt Shoemaker’s brilliant pitching performance and Kole Calhoun’s home run, as well as how the Angels extended their winning streak to seven games and their AL West lead to nine. Given the boons of time and hindsight, we now realize the presumed headlines missed the point.
-Daniel R. Epstein
