Stealing First: Is It Really an Awful Idea or Not?

MLB tries out experimental ideas by agreements with independent leagues. Stealing first or not is one such idea playing out now in the Atlantic League.

It took me a couple of days to catch up with the answer to the trivia question, “Who was the first professional baseball player credited with stealing first after Germany Schaefer?”

First, of course, you may well ask who Schaefer was unless you’re truly a baseball trivia junkie, but the fact is that Schaefer, a Washington Senator at the time, did steal first base in 1911 – from second base – because it simply wasn’t against the rules at the time.

You might correctly infer Schaefer was something of a clown, but the story is interesting, and Schaefer was likely the actual reason there’s a rule against stealing first, or running the bases backward. And that rule stood for over a hundred years.

Now, however, it is legal to steal first-base – from home – in the independent Atlantic League, and someone finally did it July 13. This happened only a few days after the announcement of the league’s experiment with allowing a batter to attempt such an advance on any pitch not cleanly caught before striking the ground or, say, the umpire, not on just the third strike.

The thief in question was Tony Thomas, a 12-year-veteran of minor league, Mexican, and independent teams. Thomas is now with the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, and he stole first against the Lancaster Barnstormers in the sixth inning on a cloudy summer’s day in Waldorf, MD.

This drew some  criticism from Call to the Pen writer Tyler Roberts, who decried this experiment as “too complex” and “gimmicky.” He doubted the rule will make it to the majors and worried that adding such a change might drive away younger fans already put off by baseball’s complicated regulations.

On his second and third points, I’d tend to agree – this experiment smells like a late summer one-and-done thing, and another rule to recall might put some people off.

However, is this rule actually more complex than the already existing missed third strike rule? Arguably, it’s adjusting a rule so that it consistently treats all pitches to a batter the same. I know at least one casual but a knowledgeable fan who just learned the dropped third strike rule in her 58th year on earth.

Oh, there are some weird scoring matters to consider when debating whether to steal first base or not. As Tim Brown points out in his Yahoo Sports piece on Thomas’s steal, the journeyman didn’t do himself any favors statistically by stealing first although it clearly made some sense since he was in a one-run game.

Stealing first is scored as a fielder’s choice when it clearly seems there’s little choice involved, but maybe that could be tinkered with, because there may be a compelling or coming reason for this rule to make it into MLB.