Following on to my post about 4-hit games within the first 50 games of a career, here are the leaders since 1957 in games with at least 1 stolen base among the first 50 games of a career:

                   Games Link to Individual Games
+-----------------+-----+-------------------------+
 Vince Coleman        25 Ind. Games
 Tim Raines           24 Ind. Games
 Alex Cole            21 Ind. Games
 Alan Wiggins         19 Ind. Games
 Jeff Stone           19 Ind. Games
 Pat Listach          19 Ind. Games
 Luis Castillo        19 Ind. Games
 Quilvio Veras        18 Ind. Games
 Gary Redus           18 Ind. Games
 Donell Nixon         18 Ind. Games
 Allan Lewis          18 Ind. Games
 Bob Dernier          18 Ind. Games
 Willie Wilson        17 Ind. Games
 Juan Samuel          17 Ind. Games
 Eddie Miller         17 Ind. Games
 Mike Felder          17 Ind. Games
 John Cangelosi       17 Ind. Games
 Ced Landrum          16 Ind. Games
 Milt Thompson        15 Ind. Games
 Terry Pendleton      15 Ind. Games
 Davey Lopes          15 Ind. Games
 Curtis Goodwin       15 Ind. Games

So, yeah yeah, we'll talk about the leaders in a minute, but there's that man, Jeff Stone, again at 19!

Using the unbelievably awesome gamelog summation tool, here's Jeff Stone's line over his first 50 games, which spanned from September 1983 to September 1984:

  G   PA  AB  R   H  2B 3B HR RBI  BB IBB  SO HBP  SH  SF GDP  SB CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS
+---+---+---+---+---+--+--+--+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--+-----+-----+-----+-----+
  50 156 148  23  55  4  5  1  14   5   0  17   2   0   1   1  24  3  .372  .397  .486  .883

Not too shabby, eh?

(See here for more on the gamelog summation tool.)

Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand, we find that Vince Coleman had the most games with a SB among his first 50 (at least since 1957.) In those 50 games, he had a whopping 42 stolen bases, with a.276 BA and .342 OBP. He also scored 43 runs. (I got that data from, you guessed it, the gamelog summation tool.)

Meanwhile, Timmy Raines 38 SB in his first 50 games, batting .307, OBP of .429, and scoring 31 runs.

In many ways, those two lines tell the story about Coleman vs Raines in their careers. No doubt Coleman was faster, but Raines was a far superior hitter. No wonder it was Coleman, not Rock, throwing firecrackers at kids in the Shea Stadium parking lot.

It's not all that surprising to see that pretty much everybody on that list above was a very fast guy. Most of them had only speed among their excellent attributes, but obviously a few (Raines, Wilson, Samuel, Pendleton, Lopes) had some hitting and defensive talents too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 8:10 am and is filed under Game Finders, Gamelogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.