The league may be moving away from MLB speedsters, but perhaps it’s because of a lack of other skills around that speed in the modern game.
MLB Speedsters have always been valuable. Ty Cobb and Cool Papa Bell were pretty fast, we’ve been told. Speedy, young Stan Musial was a very useful outfielder who also hit a lot of triples 75 years ago. Joe DiMaggio’s speed, Jackie Robinson’s speed and daring, and the genetically-endowed terrifying speed of Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente and Willie Mays were incredibly valuable to their teams.
But all those guys could hit, too.
Herb Washington changed that, and shifted the discussion of speedsters out of the casual, boy-can-he-fly realm, and began the quantified discussion of MLB speed in 1974.
My earliest memory of a quantified MLB player’s speed was a TV announcer declaring Reds outfielder Vada Pinson had run a 9.3-second hundred-yard dash. I’m not entirely sure when I heard that, but for younger folks, the world record for the hundred in yards by Charlie Greene in 1967 was dropped to 9.21 (fully automatic timing), with another runner’s hand-held time of 9.0 in 1974, by which time races were more and more contested at 100 meters (about 109.4 yards).
Pinson was the fast baseball player I ever saw before I was an adult, and I saw Clemente up close, but Washington was something else, we were assured. Among speedsters, Washington was the first true high-level track athlete to cross-over to baseball analogous to Bob Hayes in football. Arguably, however, since Hayes played college football, Washington may be considered the highest profile track athlete to cross over to a major professional sport.
Washington is said to have hit 9.2 for 100 yards in high school, surely a hand-held time, but he also apparently still holds world hand-timed records for both 50 and 60 yards (5.0 and 5.8 seconds) although his times and those race distances are now ancient, discredited history. No matter. Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley put him into a uniform with no intention that he would ever hit. He would be a pinch runner, as his ’75 baseball cards indicate with the awkward designation “Pinch Run.” The man would eventually score 33 runs, while stealing 31 bases, without ever holding a bat in major league competition. After parts of two years with the A’s, Washington moved on to the budding professional track circuit.
His career WAR – this is too much – is -0.5 because…who knows? I’d really like to hear that discussion. Who is even one comparison player?