Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of baseball.
To find Paul Goldschmidt on MLB’s leaderboard for sprint speed, be prepared to scroll. Goldschmidt, the New York Yankees’ first baseman, ranked 277th out of 410 players on Wednesday’s list at 26.5 feet per second — even after a pivotal stolen base the night before that says a lot about his approach to the game.
Trailing by a run in Seattle on Tuesday, Goldschmidt reached first base on a hit-by-pitch to lead off the top of the ninth inning. With closer Andrés Muñoz ignoring him from the mound, Goldschmidt took off for second, sliding in safely with his third stolen base of the season.
Before he could brush the dirt from his pants, Goldschmidt was removed for a pinch-runner, Pablo Reyes.
“How about that?” said the former reliever Jeff Nelson, on the Yankees’ telecast. “You can steal a bag, get yourself into scoring position, but you know what? ‘We gotta get you out of there. We don’t think you can make it around third to score.’”
Reyes did come around to score the tying run, and while the Yankees lost in 11 innings, the stolen base brought Goldschmidt 90 feet closer to a player he watched often as a young fan living near Houston.
Jeff Bagwell, the Astros’ Hall of Famer, had 202 stolen bases, the most in the past 100 years by a primary first baseman (min. 75 percent of games). Joe Kuhel, who played for the Washington Senators and the Chicago White Sox from 1930-1947, is next with 178 steals, followed by Goldschmidt at 172.
Goldschmidt, who turns 38 in September, is older than Bagwell was when he played his last game in 2005. But after a down season in St. Louis last year, Goldschmidt is thriving with the Yankees, hitting .346/.395/.506 through Thursday. He’s not sure he’ll stick around long enough to catch Bagwell, but he didn’t rule it out.
“It depends how long I play, but the game has made it easier, for sure,” Goldschmidt said. “I don’t know if I will get 30 more or not, so we’ll see. The goal is not to see if I can get as many steals as I can. That’s always something you’re balancing. I could run a lot more and get thrown out probably more, but get some more bags. But you try to be smart about it and do what’s best to help us win.”
Goldschmidt’s career high in steals is 32, for Arizona in 2016, but otherwise he’s never stolen more than 21 in a season. In the minors, he said, the Diamondbacks instilled in players the importance of base running.
“Joel Youngblood was our base-running coordinator, and he was awesome,” Goldschmidt said. “I remember him really being honest about running the bases — first and third, running hard, good leads, all the little things. Even if you weren’t the fastest guy, it was a priority. I think it helped me when I got to the big leagues.”
In the majors, Goldschmidt said, manager Kirk Gibson and coach Eric Young Sr. — who combined for more than 700 steals in their careers — shared the emphasis on smart base running. Young and another coach, Dave McKay, helped Goldschmidt sharpen his technique and spot pitchers’ tendencies.
Goldschmidt is 6-foot-2 and 225 pounds, and his 366 career homers trail only teammate Giancarlo Stanton and the Angels’ Mike Trout on the active list. But he didn’t grow up as a slugger, he said, which taught him the importance of developing his overall game. He is also a four-time Gold Glove winner at first base.
“I grew up playing middle infield,” Goldschmidt said. “I was a smaller guy so honestly that probably helped, too. I got bigger and got moved to third and eventually first, but I wasn’t pigeon-holed into first base and being a power guy.”
He’ll never be pigeon-holed as a speed guy, either, despite his pursuit — such as it is — of Bagwell. If teams expected Goldschmidt to go, he’d lose an essential element of his base-stealing skill.
“There’s opportunities out there, but obviously the more you run, the more you’re on their radar,” Goldschmidt said. “There’s times where you’re pushing it, there’s times where you’re not. With my speed, it’s gonna have to be the right time and just try to look for those opportunities and take advantage.”
Why betting to win is so risky
One of Pete Rose’s first moves as manager of the Cincinnati Reds was to hire Jim Kaat as pitching coach. Rose had hit .361 off Kaat in his career, but was briefly a teammate and respected Kaat greatly.
“I’ve always said if I were ever a manager, Kitty is the guy I want as my pitching coach,” Rose told reporters on Aug. 23, 1984, eight days after rejoining the Reds in a trade with Montreal. “He was a 20-game winner, he won 16 Gold Gloves, he was a starter and reliever and he gets along with young kids well.”
Rose was banned in 1989 for gambling on the Reds as their manager, and posthumously removed from the permanently ineligible list on Tuesday by commissioner Rob Manfred. Kaat, who served as Rose’s pitching coach through 1985, outlined in an interview Tuesday why it was so dangerous for Rose to bet on the Reds — even to win.
“I get a kick out of the president jumping in on this: ‘Well, we’re going to pardon him, he bet, but he bet on his own team, there’s nothing wrong with that,’” said Kaat, a Hall of Famer, referring to President Trump’s well-known stance on Rose. “Well, there is something wrong with that.
“He listened to me about pitching — he needed a strong pitching coach, most managers that haven’t pitched do — but he turned it all over to me. I would tell him, ‘You know, you can’t use (John) Franco tonight,’ and he wouldn’t use him.
“But if he bet on that game and it’s close or the late innings, he might be inclined to do that. And then if he had a player that maybe needs a day off, he’s got a little something with his back or whatever that might be, he’d be tempted to (say), ‘Well, I need you tonight, go ahead and play,’ because he’s bet on the game. So that’s not good.”
Also troubling: MLB’s investigator, John Dowd, found that Rose did not bet on the Reds when struggling veterans Mario Soto and Bill Gullickson started. In theory, such a pattern could have been interpreted as a signal to other bettors to pick against the Reds in those games.
Simply put, the best case for Rose’s eventual election to the Hall of Fame is mercy. Perhaps because he was banished for the last 36 years of his life, Rose could be forgiven in death and honored with a plaque. But it’s foolish to defend what he did by saying that Rose only bet on his team to win. Take his pitching coach’s word for it.
Gimme Five
Author Scott Miller on modern managers
Scott Miller went into coaching as a student at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He was good at it, too, guiding an intramural women’s flag football team to glory.
“We had a good season, we won the championship,” Miller said. “And I retired on my laurels.”
Miller moved on to baseball writing, and in his decades covering the majors, he has closely tracked the significant evolution of the manager’s role. That’s the basis for Miller’s new book: “Skipper – Why Baseball Managers Matter (And Always Will),” released on Tuesday by Grand Central Publishing.
Miller spoke with dozens of managers, including the Dodgers’ Dave Roberts, whom he shadowed for four days down the stretch in 2022 and met again after last fall’s World Series victory. He also visited Aaron Boone’s parents, Bob and Sue, as they watched their son pilot the Yankees on TV.
Here are five thoughts from Miller, a former colleague at the New York Times, on the shifting duties and demands of baseball’s most forward-facing position.
Whose lineup is it, anyway? “So many people think that a lot of managers don’t even make their own lineups now. ‘Where do lineups come from?’ — to me, that’s baseball’s version of kids asking parents where babies come from. They’re really awkward conversations that cause a lot of staring into space and shuffling of the feet. There’s no doubt the role of manager has changed over the decades. But I don’t think it’s quite as simple as, ‘Hey, they all get their lineups handed to them from the front office.’ I think it is a lot more nuanced than that.”
It’s a human league: “Earl Weaver and Sparky Anderson never wanted to get to know their players personally. Sparky always said, ‘Hey, if I get too close with any players, I know it’s going to hurt when it comes time I have to release them or trade them. And so I don’t want that.’ Whereas today you’ve got a guy like Dave Roberts who wants to at least make some kind of contact with every one of his 26 players before every single game. So communication is huge today. As Bruce Bochy says in the book, when he first started managing, you used to tell players what to do. Today, when you tell them, you have to explain why you want them to do it or what the reason is. So communication, a little bit of salesmanship, patience — being able to navigate human relationships is way more important for a manager today than decades ago. And it’s not just relating with players, but relating with expanded front offices. You don’t usually have just one general manager to work with. You have to collaborate with the entire baseball operations department. And the old-school managers never had to do that.”
When a bad team fires a good manager: “Mostly what they accomplish today, I think, is simply changing the public narrative to satiate frustrated fans, and I don’t know if it goes much beyond that. It used to be that when teams would change managers, they’d be like, ‘Well, the manager we have now is too calm, he’s too nice,’ so they’d bring in a drill master to show the players a few things. Or if that guy didn’t work, it’d be, ‘The players are too uptight under a strict, militaristic type of guy, so now we need to change to a nicer guy.’ So you’d have these pendulum swings. And in today’s game, most of the managers, while all different, all 30 guys, to some degree, have to be nice guys. You’re not going to have some hard-ass guy that’s going to snap at somebody, because that doesn’t look good. It goes out on video and makes the organization look bad.”
The Boones, calm and feisty: “One of the things I really try to do as a baseball writer is take readers and fans behind the scenes and into areas they maybe can’t get to themselves, however creative or unique that can be. I know the Boone family is settled not far from me in San Diego, and I hit upon that idea — with Aaron’s blessing — because I wanted to talk to Bob anyway about his own experiences managing in Kansas City and Cincinnati, and the Boone family lineage in the game. I thought it’d be interesting to talk to Bob about what he sees in Aaron — what are some similarities, what are the differences? I looked it up and saw Aaron had managed fewer games than Bob, but had three or four times more ejections. So I said to Bob, ‘Hey, you’re the best-behaved guy in the Boone family.’ And Sue piped right in and said that, speaking as his mother, it takes a lot to rile Aaron, but if you push him, “the clouds come out … and he’s generally right.”
Do-it-all Dave Roberts: “Dave’s communication skills are off the charts, and you see that especially in the trust he builds with his players and his roster. He also has a rare ability to change hats all the time. One day he may have to deal with some issues regarding his players. He can move from that seamlessly into meetings with the analytics department. And he can move from that — again, seamlessly — to speaking at a statue dedication that maybe the Dodgers’ marketing department asked him to do. You maybe would’ve seen Tommy Lasorda do that, but managers like Whitey Herzog probably aren’t speaking at statue dedications or making dozens of public appearances during a season or visiting with VIP fans on the field during batting practice. Those old-school managers would have been insulted had they been asked to do all these things. But it’s part of today’s life with modern managers and Dave Roberts handles it as well as anyone.”
Off The Grid
General Crowder, Twins 20-win season
Judge Reinhold has no jurisdiction in a court of law. Prince was not a member of the royal family. Julius Erving (Dr. J) does not practice medicine. And General Crowder was not a general.
As a two-time 20-game winner for the Washington Senators (ancestors of the Minnesota Twins), Crowder was an answer in Monday’s Immaculate Grid. And while he never attained the rank of general, he did enlist in the Army in 1919, serving in Siberia and the Philippines, where he volunteered for the baseball team despite never having played.
It turned out that Alvin Floyd Crowder had a very strong arm, and after his discharge, he signed with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League in 1922. Four years later he was in the majors, starting a distinguished career that included three 20-win seasons (the other with the St. Louis Browns) and a World Series victory with the 1935 Detroit Tigers.
As for the nickname, there was an actual General Crowder — Enoch Crowder, Provost Marshal of the U.S. Army, who administered the draft in World War I. As a military man, Crowder was called “General” by teammates, and the name stuck.
Crowder pitched in the first All-Star Game, in 1933, working three innings between two Hall of Fame Leftys — Gomez and Grove. He finished 167-115 with a 4.12 ERA, and does not appear to have been a general crowder of hitters: he faced more than 10,000, but just hit just 16 with a pitch.
Classic Clip
Rappin’ with Ozzie Guillen and Lou Piniella
The White Sox visit Wrigley Field this weekend for the North Side edition of the Crosstown Classic. And with apologies to Will Venable and Craig Counsell, it’ll be hard to top Ozzie Guillen and Lou Piniella as rivalry hypemen.
Guillen — currently awestruck by the fact that the Pope knows his name — managed the White Sox from 2004 to 2011, overlapping for four seasons with Piniella, who guided the Cubs from 2007 to 2010. Here, they trade insults while rapping for Chevy:
Lou: “Sparks will fly from our Cubby bats!”
Ozzie: “You remind me of Minnesota Fats!”
It’s only 30 seconds, which is a shame. This duo should have collaborated on an album of diss tracks. Has anybody won both a World Series ring and a Grammy?
(Top photo of Paul Goldschmidt: G Fiume / Getty Images)
