The typical big-league pitcher spends about two-fifths of his time in the stretch. Even at the peak of the Speed Era, teams maxed out at just 1.21 steal attempts per contest, yet major-league pitching coaches opted to have their pitchers alter their mechanics for dozens of deliveries per game in order to create an advantage on a single pitch. The steal lost momentum as focus turned to the long ball, and league-wide rates have stayed below one steal attempt per game since 2000. The above chart covers the past 40 years of base-stealing, detailing the ascension of the steal throughout the 1970s that precipitated the spike of the 1980s. As Henderson told Harold Reynolds after the Mariner second baseman stole 60 bags in the 1987 season, вЂњRickey stole 60 at the break!вЂќ For example, Michael Bourn has led the National League in stolen bases for three straight seasons, though his career-high is вЂњjustвЂќ 61 steals (accomplished twice). Today's top rogues of the base paths typically top out around 60 to 70 steals, with Jose Reyes' 78-steal tally of 2007 sticking out like a hitchhiker's thumb on the decade's SB leaderboard. Henderson and Coleman were the last players to accomplish the feat, having tallied 174 steals between them in the '88 season, and were responsible for 10 of the 80-steal seasons between them, but the base-swiping explosion was hardly a two-man show (see accompanying chart).

Since the Dead Ball Era, there have been 18 player-seasons that surpassed the 80-steal threshold, and 15 of those performances occurred in the 10-year stretch from 1979-1988. The slide step is an artifact of the 1980s, a time when players such as Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman were surpassing 100 stolen bases with regularity, terrorizing pitchers with constant distractions on the base paths. The slide step invention is in dire need of an intervention. вЂќ True to form, the slide step was borne from the need to suppress stolen bases at a time when the game was experiencing a record surge of thievery, but I submit that the strategy carries heavy costs that fail to outweigh the perceived benefits. The classic Greek sabermetrician Plato said that вЂњnecessity is the mother of invention.

Pitch from the stretch