SMS Background

One day, while surfing the now defunct Total Baseball Web site, I uncovered some interesting and unexpected information.  Total Baseball listed the top 100 players for dozens of statistical categories in both season and career totals, and in some cases they did a further breakdown by era.  For kicks and grins, I looked up who had the most lifetime triples.  It turns out that at the beginning of this century, the triple was far more common than it is today due to differing ball park configurations and ground rules, poorer gloves and a different style of play generally.  From 1940 onward, however, the number of triples has stabilized, so I checked who had the most lifetime triples since 1940.

I fully expected to see a very fast player at the top of the list (Willie Davis, Lou Brock, Roberto Clemente) because of the well known (some would say intuitively obvious) correlation between foot speed and triples.  In fact Davis, Brock and Clemente are all in the top 10 for lifetime triples since 1940, but none of them claim the number one spot.

The number one player for career triples since 1940 is Stan Musial with 177.  Now we all know that Stan Musial was a great, great ball player, but nobody ever attributed to him more than average foot speed.  So how is it that he has more career triples than anyone else since 1940?  Then I remembered something Bill James had written about Musial in the first Historical Baseball Abstract.  "Stan Musial always left the batters box on a dead run."

Today’s typical ball player admires his home runs and half-heartedly runs out pop ups, but Musial never once watched one of his home runs or failed to run out a pop up at full speed.  Pete Rose and Enos Slaughter received a lot of good press for their hustle (and in fact they are also in the top ten for career triples since 1940), but Musial, with much less recognition for it, showed just as much hustle on the base baths, and he has 177 triples to prove it.

Musial is also third on the all time list for doubles with 725 (behind Rose and Tris Speaker) so he was obviously stretching quite a few singles into doubles as well.  Thus, in honor of Musial, I have developed what I call the Stan Musial Statistic (or SMS for short).  It is designed in such a way that players wishing to accumulate high SMS totals must, like Musial, get in the habit of leaving the batters box on a dead run.