Reese Kaplan -- Do You Remember When Runners Would Steal Bases?

With all of the hullabaloo regarding the change in the pitching clock, batter's clock and elimination of shifts facing baseball for this upcoming season, not a whole lot of time has been spent pondering what it's going to mean for some of the Little League fundamentals that have long since been put to rest.

Think back a bit to when the Mets featured players like Mookie Wilson, Rickey Henderson, (yes) Vince Coleman and (yes) Roger Cedeno. Can you remember the head games they would play with the opponent's pitchers and catchers worrying that they would be stealing bases and advancing into scoring position without waiting for the bat to contact the ball in order for that event to take place.

Nowadays when a player crosses the 20 SB threshold you hear stories about how dangerous a runner he could be and how a single could turn into a double or scoring from first base on a ball hit towards the gap becomes the announcers' hardy topic of debate. Yes, these things can indeed happen and could strife for the defensive team on the field, yet they still require that knocking sound of a wooden bat making contact with a stitched baseball.

Whatever happened to the stolen base?

As you look down the Mets roster as it's likely to exist you see that Francisco Lindor has the potential to exceed 20 SBs per season. So too does right fielder (recovering from surgeries -- plural), Starling Marte. Brandon Nimmo has very good baserunning speed but rarely attempts a theft. Jeff McNeil is competent on the bases but is not regarded as the next Ralph Garr. Big Pete Alonso and bigger Daniel Vogelbach are not going to set pitchers and catchers hearts aflutter. We won't even talk about Mark Canha, Eduardo Escobar and the catchers. It seems that speed has not been a real part of the roster building game plan for quite awhile.

So let's return to the rule changes and revisit the topic of the stolen base. If a pitcher is limited in how many throws he can make to a base and must deliver to the plate within a prescribed number of seconds it is probably time to revisit thievery as part of your game plan. The fewer throws that are made to the base means a runner can set himself up for a longer lead and start to play those vital head games with the opponent.

To counteract that advantage to the baserunner, perhaps, is the pitch clock which means you won't have a pitcher meandering on the mound and giving the runner an extra few seconds to get his feet in motion as might have happened in the past.

Then again you have the issue of defensive shifts being curtailed which might make swing the pendulum back towards the runner somewhat who might otherwise have been reluctant to sprint from first to second when there are three defensive players on that side of the infield against a left handed batter.

I've long been an advocate of small ball as a great way of consistently winning games punctuated by Earl Weaver's favorite. It seems to me that over the past several seasons the long ball has supplanted many other strategies for winning. Perhaps now it time that we dust off the stolen base as a forgotten weapon and reintroduce it as part of the winning strategy. How frustrating was it to see batters who were good at working the count get on base and then do nothing once they got there? Let's not forget it is indeed possible to advance without the batter hitting the ball.