We try to spread things out here at FanGraphs Dot Com, so it’s unusual for us to have articles about the same player on consecutive days. But yesterday, we ran a story by Davy Andrews on Victor Robles, who’s been one of the rare bright spots for the Seattle Mariners this season.
Robles was released by the Washington Nationals in early June — which is itself a pretty dark omen — but in 68 games with Seattle, he’s performed at a superstar level, and… you know what, just go read Davy’s piece. Something this unexpectedly positive is probably not going to last forever. Even if Robles has rediscovered himself after years of hitting like a pitcher, I’d take the under on his OBP staying in the .400s for the long term. Which is the inherent irony of a story like that: By the time a hot streak is worth writing about, it’s usually closer to the end than the beginning.
But even by those standards, Davy got a really terrible break. On Tuesday night, Robles pulled off the baseball equivalent of flying his hang glider into a set of high-tension wires. He got lifted in the third inning due to a hand injury, but not before he made one of the more baffling baserunning gaffes I can remember. I’m not here specifically to dump on Robles, who after all was 25-for-25 in stolen base attempts with Seattle to that point. Captain Bartholomew Roberts was the last Mariner to steal so frequently and so successfully.
The context for this clip is that the Mariners were down 2-0 in the top of the first inning, with the bases loaded, two outs, and a 3-0 count to Justin Turner. So, I’ll say something in Robles’ defense. I get what he was thinking. At the moment he broke for home, he was on an all-timer of a basestealing heater, he had a big secondary lead, and nobody was looking at him. Least of all the pitcher, Luis Gil, who was bent over with his back to third base, futzing with the rosin bag.
It’s pretty common for football coaches to leave a standing order for a fake punt. Rather than pick a moment based on game situation, the coach will tell his special teams captain to audible to a fake anytime he sees the opposition lined up in a certain way. Having designed the fake to take advantage of a numerical advantage on one side of the formation or the other, the coach trusts his players to execute for a likely first down. And that’s kind of what happened here.
Robles didn’t break for home because he’s a lunatic or an idiot, he took off because he recognized that the Yankees had given him a massive opening. Even after Gil perked up immediately and made a perfect throw, it was still a bang-bang play at the plate. And let’s not act like the Mariners’ couldn’t have used a spark. They might not be dead — they were still above 10% playoff odds entering play Tuesday — but they’ve certainly felt dead for a hot minute. Their previously unhittable breakout pitcher, Bryan Woo, had just been tagged for two runs in the top of the first, and we can debate the concept of momentum all night, but in a moment like that, surely Robles would’ve known that his team could use a morale boost.
Better baserunners than Robles have gone on tilt and tried to force something when their team is losing and has struggled to score runs. With that said, Turner has a career .362 OBP, and Gil had already hit Robles and walked two other batters in the inning. None of the first three pitches of the plate appearance was close. Odds are, Robles was coming home on the next pitch anyway, either on a walk or by virtue of Turner hitting a get-me-over fastball into the gap. And with two outs, the downside was taking the bat out of the hands of a good hitter in a favorable count, and wiping a bases-loaded situation off the board. Which turned out to be quite unhelpful for a team that, once again, is 24th in the majors in runs.
The totality of it — the hardest base to steal, the fact that failure erased the most advantageous possible combination of count and baserunners — is just staggering. Obviously it’s not the most damaging stolen base attempt in history, because while the Mariners are fighting for their playoff lives (or at least they were), this is still the first inning of a regular season game. Once upon a time, Babe Ruth got caught stealing to end Game 7 of the World Series with a .300 hitter at the plate. By that standard, what Robles did is small potatoes.
So I went to Baseball Savant and looked for precedent: Three-ball count, two outs, runner caught stealing to end the inning. Before Robles, there had been 59 other instances since 2008, which is as far back as the database goes, and only one other this year. (In one of those glitch-in-the-Matrix coincidences, the last two times this happened before Tuesday, Lourdes Gurriel Jr. was at the plate.) I’m a little surprised that it doesn’t happen more. It’s common for the runner to be put in motion with three balls and two outs — regardless of whether there are two strikes — because there’s no danger of the runner being doubled off on a ball in the air.
And, in this situation, we only get a runner thrown out 3 1/2 times a year, across the entire league? Oh well. Of the 59 failed stolen base attempts, 51 were either an attempted steal of second or an attempted steal of third with a runner on first — in other words, the baserunners tried to get a jump on a walk but the batter unexpectedly got a strike. In 18 of those instances, the hitter even swung and missed at the pitch, making the play, essentially, a blown hit-and-run.
Of the remaining plays, my favorite is this 2018 attempt by Javier Báez to steal third base. By that point, the hitter, Ben Zobrist, was near the end of his career, but he was still pretty handy with the bat in his hands. Plus, the count was 3-0. More to the point, Báez got as bad a jump as you’ll see, and ended up getting thrown out by — and I think Statcast will back me up on this — about a million miles. What Robles did was a massive risk, but I think this was a worse baserunning decision.
There is one, and only one, instance of a runner getting caught stealing home with three balls and two outs in an inning: On June 26, 2011, Matt Treanor swung through a 3-0 pitch with Jeff Francoeur on first and Alex Gordon on third, with the Royals up 4-1 on the Cubs in the bottom of the third inning. I can’t find video of the incident, and the Associated Press recap of the game doesn’t mention it, but based on the box score, it looks like this was a failed double steal. Catcher Geovany Soto threw to shortstop Starlin Castro, who got the ball back home in time to get Gordon at the plate. No matter, Kansas City won 6-3, and nobody thought about either of these teams again for another three years.
There are more than 100 other instances of runners getting caught stealing home with two outs in the pitch tracking era, irrespective of count, but only three with the bases loaded. The most recent happened in 2015, so there’s no video on Baseball Savant. Luckily, I found written descriptions of all three, so let’s see how those incidents were received at the time. On April 14, 2012, Brett Lawrie bolted for home with the bases loaded and José Bautista at the plate. And if you needed any information other than “Brett Lawrie” to know whether that was viewed as a wise choice, manager John Farrell called it a “major baserunning mistake.” Bautista, . . .
