All-Time Steals Progressive Leaders
Posted by Sean Forman on May 12, 2009
Progressive Leaders & Records for Stolen Bases - Baseball-Reference.com
One of the features I really like on the site are the progressive leaderboard pages that give you a view of the record holders for a particular stat over the years. I was noticing that the current active steals leader was just at 432 steals which seems very low to me. Scanning this list you can see that this is the lowest total for the active leader going back to pre-Maury Wills and the station-to-station 50's and early 1960's.
May 12th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Harold Baines was the active leader in RBI after 1999. He is the only player in the past 90 years to be the active leader who is not in the HOF or an obvious future HOFer. (NB, I am not using this fact to advocate his election.)
May 12th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
The active leader for triples has less than 100 for the first time since 1885!!!
And additionally, I refuse to accept that Kenny Lofton is retired!!!
May 12th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Showing Arlie Latham as the active leader in steals from 1902 to 1909 is a bit misleading. Latham retired in 1899 (or maybe 1896) and then came back to play four games in 1909 (I think he was a coach for the Giants and McGraw put him in a few games at the end of the season).
May 13th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Similar to Gerry's comment...Jim O'Rourke is listed as the "Active" leader in career hits from 1898-1903, even though his total was unchanged (2,642). Obviously, he wasn't active; in fact, he hadn't played since 1893. However, for whatever reason, he then appeared in one game in 1904 and got one more hit.
For these lists, would it be possible to alter the criteria to better reflect who was really 'active'? 'First-last' probably yields a lot of these anomalies. It would be a better representation if a player had to appear in at least one game in a given season in order to be considered 'active' at that time. It still wouldn't be perfect. For example, was Sammy Sosa 'active' in 2006? No, but his career wasn't over yet either.
May 15th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Yeah, and Steve Finley had 12 triples at the age of 41!
May 15th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
not only that, but in 1990, Dwight Evans was the leader in homers!