This. DiMaggio could get a little prickly about stolen bases. I read an interview once where someone brought up how many more steals players like Willie Mays had in comparison to Joltin’ Joe. DiMaggio replied that he rarely got the sign to steal, so his stolen base totals didn’t reflect his own baserunning. Which made some sense - DiMaggio played for very high-scoring teams, so eaking out runs with stolen bases didn’t really make sense in context. It’s kind of like how Johnny Bench didn’t throw out many baserunners - everyone knew what a great arm he had, so no one ran on him.
On a related note, someone once asked DiMaggio’s manager Joe McCarthy if the Yankee Clipper could bunt. “I don’t know,” McCarthy replied, “and I have no intention of finding out.” When you can hit like DiMaggio, why bunt?
It was common for players back then to have (or have sports writers make up) redundant nicknames. Babe Ruth was known as the Sultan of Swat, Lou Gehrig as Larrupping Lou, boxer Joe Louis was referred to as the Brown Bomber or Sepia Slugger, among other things.
And some players have random peculiar names. For example, Who’s on first base, What’s on second, and I Don’t Know is on third. I’ll tell you the pitcher’s name, Tomorrow.
Never heard of that stuff. I thought that link was gonna be about his Mr Coffee commercials. (This one hawks a model that has an “electronic digital command system” that allows you to set it to start up the next morning.)
Me, neither. I do remember DiMaggio advertising Mr. Coffee machines on TV. That’s where his association with coffee comes from, decades before the Joltin’ Joe coffee company.
The 77 stolen bases in 1936 were the second highest total in the American League.
The Yankees in DiMaggio’s time were absolutely NOT a slow team. They did NOT try an unusually low number of steals. They were in the top half of the league in steals as often as not.
As Colibri points out, the apparently low numbers are an illusion of context. Teams in those days did not steal much, for a variety of reasons. While a few players started stealing again in the 60s, steals did not return as a common strategy until the 1970s.
This is more or less true; looking at the numbers Bench was seeing somewhere around 70% of the stolen base attempts most catchers would. So fewer than normal - but still isn’t it weird it’s that high?
In the early 1980s, people were running on Gary Carter 150-170 times a year, who if anything had a BETTER arm than Bench. Carter was throwing out way over 40 percent of basestealers in his prime, which is just murderous to the opposition. I doubt any catcher who ever lived won as many games solely with his arm as Gary Carter did in the early 80s; his ability to throw out basestealers had to be worth two to three full wins a year, easy.
In his prime Ivan Rodriguez was blowing runners away, more than HALF of all basestealers from 1991 to 2001. He was only facing about half the normal total of basestealers - but why were that many people trying? I-Rod had as good or better an arm as Carter, but Carter got to throw more men out 'cause everyone ran like crazy in the 80s, so Carter’s arm won more games.
Against an elite defensive catcher, the logical thing is to NEVER attempt a steal, unless you have Rickey Henderson or Vince Coleman running and the pitcher isn’t good at holding runners. Why they were committing suicide against Ivan Rodriguez 40-50 times a year I cannot explain.
Not necessarily redundant. One can leave a team but still be living in the neighbourhood. Or you can leave the team and then move to another city. Or you can leave the team and then die.
About stolen bases: Richie Ashburn regularly won the SB crown with the mid-20s. There are at least two reasons for this. One is that the hitting was much better. There was a team around 1950 with a team batting average of just over .300. I am not sure, but I assume that it was the fact that starting pitchers were usually expected to finish their games. They were continually told they had to pace themselves to last nine innings (and sometimes more). Now the starters go all out for 5 or 6 innings and then are relieved. With more hitting, SBs become less used because the cost of losing a runner are a bit higher and the advantage of the extra base a bit lower. But another factor was that there was much less enforcement of the balk rules, which obviously makes stealing harder. Ty Cobb’s record of over 90 in a season was inconceivable to a 1950s fan like me.
The Shah of Shellac
The Pasha of Paste
The Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of Knock
Sultan of Swat was actually the coolest of his many sobriquets, as there was (at least, potentially) a real-life Sultan of Swat somewhere in what is now Pakistan. One of the easier questions (for me) in a quite tough British-published quiz book was to name the Sultan of Swat (Babe Ruth was the one they had in mind).
My grandfather once wrote in protest to Jimmy Cannon, or perhaps the paper he appeared in, taking issue with Cannon’s claim that Joe DiMaggio was the second greatest Yankee of all time. He argued that any damn fool knows you can larrup a ball a hell of a lot farther than you can jolt one. The letter ran in the paper with “damn fool” softened to “schoolchild” and I forget just what happened to “hell of a lot”.
Btw, though I have never in my life seen the word “larrup” or “larrupin’” applied to anyone but Lou Gehrig, dictionary.com traces it to 1815-25 and suggests it is from the Dutch word “larpen” (to thresh with flails).
You have to look this stuff up because of assholes like me.
Richie Ashburn only led the league in stolen bases once… with 32. (His rookie year, actually.)
Your timelines are a bit off. No team has hit .300 since the 1930s, and in Ashburn’s day they hit no better than they do today.
The further back you go the more starters finished their games, but that does not track with offense going up and down. Starters finished their games far more often in 1934, when there was lots of hitting, than in 1968, when there was very little hitting. But they finished games even less often in 1997 than in 1968, though 1997 was a very good hitting year, and finished games less often still in 2017, though there was less hitting than in 1997.
That said, in Ashburn’s day starters finished the game about a third of the time. It was a bit more than that when he started, and less in the latter half of his career.
