I've always wondered why inside-the-park home runs aren't called "quadruples" and tracked separately from HR's, since they are different accomplishments.
They are so rare that it doesn't really matter. But does Baseball Reference even have a way to look up how many inside-the-park HR's Wahoo Crawford hit?
Putting 10-15 feet of resilient netting on top of all outfield fences would turn cheap homers into balls caroming around the outfield while runners race for third. And offer a million dollar bonus for the third base coach whose team leads the league in triples.
My dad, who spent his entire life in Ohio other than part of his college years, was inducted in the Oklahoma Navy - he had been on an advisory panel for an Oklahoma government project, I think. The certificate shows a canoe.
Joe - i figure your and Mike's new book will cover the many ways being a fan brings us joy. For me, off the top of my head, when one of my favorite groups/artists announce they're dropping a new release, my joy meter goes to 11.
Case in point: Stewart Copeland released a limited edition vinyl version of his 1986 release "The Rhythmatist" for Record Store Day a couple of weeks ago. I had a cassette of it decades ago, but lost it somehow. CD copies of it on Amazon have been crazy expensive I didn't score a copy earlier this month on RSD, but, I thought last week: "I wonder if he put it on Spotify?" Not only did he do so (and it sounds superb 40 years later) but he's releasing a deluxe version on vinyl later this month.
Almost any kind of music brings me joy (well, maybe not most opera pieces and "hot country"). Thanks for reminding me to identify joy in my life (another example, our new rescue dog from West Texas) and not taking it for granted.
Astro fans still love to talk and reminisce about Evan Gattis’ 2015 season, his first with the team. Out of the blue he exploded for 11 triples that season in about 600 PA. IThe rest of his career (before and after) he had over 2000 PA and only 1 triple. Gattis’ triple barrage still gets brought up at least a few times every year on the tv broadcast. It was an amazingly fun season (after being stuck at the bottom of the league for years) and Evan Gattis was a huge part of that.
The Pacific Coast League has a (well-deserved) reputation for offense. But the fun part is all the triples. The five super-high elevation cities have big dimensions, leading to huge gaps and lots of triples. Reno already has 17 (!) this year, El Paso has 12, Albuquerque and Oklahoma City have 10, Las Vegas and Salt Lake with 8.
Also, bringing up the Cannibal, cycling stage races have some great names at the top right now: Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel & the youngster, French hope Paul Seixas.
You gotta love watching Pagacar race. No more sitting in the peloton waiting for the last half mile of the finishing climb. The kid attacks, and often in places that seem, well, stupid. But he's good enough to get away with it.
I'm torn on Pogacar, because it's amazing performance, but also he wins so regularly that the seeming risks turn out never to be risks at all. It's like watching a Bond movie: you're never for a moment concerned that SPECTRE will come out ahead.
- Roberto Clemente in the only player who is in the top 50 in career triples who played in the played in past 60 years (#he's #27). Playing home game at Forbes Field helps.
-Willie Wilson, the most exiting guy the past 50 years running after hitting the ball, not only triples, but inside-the-park HRs. He is #56 all time.
Incidentally, Konnor Griffin got off to a slow start (double in his first PA, then 14 outs plus a walk, etc), but he does already have 2 triples, and on Saturday he finished a homer shy of the cycle.
Apparently at home he trains on one of these high tech simulators that can match real pitchers' arsenals and replicate real ballparks, and he practiced hitting into the North Side Notch at PNC, which is tailor-made for generating triples. So maybe he'll generate some fun for the fans.
Also, I realize that Willie Wilson's % of triples/hits doesn't reach One Dog's (although if you throw in his 13 ITPHRs, he comes closer), but he led the league 5 times in triples like Johnson and in his first few years, no one hit triples like Willie. In 1979, he had 13 triples and 5 ITPHRs. In 1980 he had 15 triples and 2 ITPHRs and in 1982 he had 15 triples and another 3 ITPHRs. Some of that is due to Royals Stadium's unique corners to their outfield combined with artificial turf, but still Willie flying around the bases is something I have never seen duplicated.
Willie Wilson may well be the fastest player I've ever seen. But yeah, a lot of that is the park. For his career, he hit about 50% more triples at home than on the road, albeit a smaller edge during his younger years.
George Brett, to my memory, wasn't particularly fast. But he played hard, running out of the box on everything, something he got from the s-l-o-w Hal McRae. Brett lead the AL 3x in 3B and had a year with over 20. That turf in KC was something else back in the day.
Other fastest contender? Billy Hamilton was something else and it is great that he shares a name with Sliding Billy of the 1800s. Also, I wonder what Deion Sanders would have done had he devoted himself to the superior sport. A league leading 14 triples in '92 despite only 325 PAs. Twice second in the league in SB despite never being close to a full time player. The speed wasn't refined - he didn't get good jumps on the basepaths or tracking a fly ball. But my what could have been.
I was torn on Sanders (to me the trash talk & bravado didn't quite align with the actual performance) until he started wearing his uniform pants the old fashioned way in 1997 in honor of Jackie, which I thought was just awesome.
That was a weird season for him, incidentally: by far the most games played (115), but not very productive, going negative in the field and his worst hitting since his 1992 breakout. But the curious part is that A. he wasn't that old (only 29, although granted, he was burning the candle at both ends), and B. the decline was almost all power. His AVG & OBP were basically the same as years when he had much better OPS+, but his ISO dropped from .131 and better to .090. He actually had exactly 25 XBH in '95, '96, & '97, but it took ~100 more PAs to get there in '97.
There is a story, possibly true, about Sanders early in his career. He hit an infield pop-up and was just standing there not moving when Carlton Fisk barked at him about respecting the game. Sanders said something to Fisk about not being a slave and Fisk jumped in his face about how the greats from Jackie & Frank Robinson on down didn't consider it 'slavery' to be respectful to the game and their opponents.
At the time, I was firmly inside Carlton's camp. But I can see that story from both sides now. Fisk was more than a bit of a red-arse and policing demeanor of the other side is a jackwagon move. It is, however, also clear that Pudge got every ounce of performance out of his less than gifted body. (And may well have been helped along the way by being an early advocate of weight training -- and the (ahem) supplements those lifters were using.)
In a similar vein is Bo Jackson. Football speed and baseball speed are just different things. Anyway, my proof of Bo's speed is his first major league hit. An infield hit. On a routine ground ball to second base.
I'm surprised Joe didn't quote George Foster on the matter:
“I don't know why people like the home run so much. A home run is over as soon as it starts.... The triple is the most exciting play of the game. A triple is like meeting a woman who excites you, spending the evening talking and getting more excited, then taking her home. It drags on and on. You're never sure how it's going to turn out.”
The only cycle I've ever seen was Jason Kendall at Three Rivers. He came up in the 8th or 9th, the proverbial triple shy of the cycle, and smacked one to IIRC right-center. It wasn't an obvious triple ball, but he wanted it, and I can still picture him flying around the bases and flopping into 3rd. Crowd was going absolutely nuts because, again, the triple is the most exciting play in baseball.
OK, this is weird: I was under the impression that passed balls were up due to catchers changing position to improve framing. But I checked, and they're down significantly over the past 10 years, from 381 in 2017 to 233 in 2025. Wild pitches are down as well, so it's not a shift in how scorers are seeing things.
But here's the weird part: annual variation is small, but there've been stair-step changes. Here are the PB numbers starting in 2017 (skipping 2020): 381, 370, 349, 349, 231, 232, 239, 233. There are hundreds of thousands of pitches a year, it seems impossible to have almost the exact same number of passed balls from year to year. And wild pitches are similar: 1810, 1847, 1788 ,1862, 1607, 1613, 1439, 1430.
What on earth happened between 2021 (2211 balls going to the backstop) and 2022 (1838 combined)? That's a 17% reduction between years, and then 2022 has almost the exact same total (1845 combined). It's bizarre.
That fact was noted in the comment section a month or so back. BR Ed B. (I think) showed the data for both PB and WP going back a while. The inflection point *seemed* to come when catchers crossed the rubicon and began to be in the one-knee down stance more than half the time, something counter-intuitive to me as I would have thought that decreased mobility. But I couldn't offer a different potential cause (reduction in use of split finger fastballs?, change in equipment? ...) that would be so dramatic.
Oh man, I missed that completely. I agree completely with your intuition, and the only way I can square it is that way more passed balls than we thought were going through the 5-hole, which essentially no longer exists. Because there's simply no way that the one-knee stance allows as much lateral movement.
Yeah ... the comment section is wonderful. But not a great repository for research of that nature. Myself absolutely excluded, we have some truly Brilliant BRs. With no index to the best of the comments.
One other factor in Wahoo Sam's Triples. Many of the parks they played in before 1910 had no walls at all. There is no question in my mind, many of Wahoo Sam's triples were "power triples". Had walls existed he probably would have a lot fewer triples and a LOT more HRs/doubles.
I've always wondered why inside-the-park home runs aren't called "quadruples" and tracked separately from HR's, since they are different accomplishments.
They are so rare that it doesn't really matter. But does Baseball Reference even have a way to look up how many inside-the-park HR's Wahoo Crawford hit?
Putting 10-15 feet of resilient netting on top of all outfield fences would turn cheap homers into balls caroming around the outfield while runners race for third. And offer a million dollar bonus for the third base coach whose team leads the league in triples.
My dad, who spent his entire life in Ohio other than part of his college years, was inducted in the Oklahoma Navy - he had been on an advisory panel for an Oklahoma government project, I think. The certificate shows a canoe.
Wahoo Sam had one of the most fun and interesting chapters in The Glory of Their Times. Fascinating guy.
Joe - i figure your and Mike's new book will cover the many ways being a fan brings us joy. For me, off the top of my head, when one of my favorite groups/artists announce they're dropping a new release, my joy meter goes to 11.
Case in point: Stewart Copeland released a limited edition vinyl version of his 1986 release "The Rhythmatist" for Record Store Day a couple of weeks ago. I had a cassette of it decades ago, but lost it somehow. CD copies of it on Amazon have been crazy expensive I didn't score a copy earlier this month on RSD, but, I thought last week: "I wonder if he put it on Spotify?" Not only did he do so (and it sounds superb 40 years later) but he's releasing a deluxe version on vinyl later this month.
Almost any kind of music brings me joy (well, maybe not most opera pieces and "hot country"). Thanks for reminding me to identify joy in my life (another example, our new rescue dog from West Texas) and not taking it for granted.
Astro fans still love to talk and reminisce about Evan Gattis’ 2015 season, his first with the team. Out of the blue he exploded for 11 triples that season in about 600 PA. IThe rest of his career (before and after) he had over 2000 PA and only 1 triple. Gattis’ triple barrage still gets brought up at least a few times every year on the tv broadcast. It was an amazingly fun season (after being stuck at the bottom of the league for years) and Evan Gattis was a huge part of that.
Wahoo Sam and One Dog in the same post. Well done Joe!
The Pacific Coast League has a (well-deserved) reputation for offense. But the fun part is all the triples. The five super-high elevation cities have big dimensions, leading to huge gaps and lots of triples. Reno already has 17 (!) this year, El Paso has 12, Albuquerque and Oklahoma City have 10, Las Vegas and Salt Lake with 8.
Reno being the Triple-A affiliate of the D-Backs!
Gotta get 'em ready to do it in the pros!
One Dog! Thanks for bringing him up.
Jim Landis. Chet Lemon. Lance Johnson. WSox CFs.
They could patrol that area!
Also, bringing up the Cannibal, cycling stage races have some great names at the top right now: Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel & the youngster, French hope Paul Seixas.
Oh, also for joy, saw Springsteen last week. Seeing him sing along with Steve Van Zandt on "Two Hearts" was joyous. Two longtime pals.
You gotta love watching Pagacar race. No more sitting in the peloton waiting for the last half mile of the finishing climb. The kid attacks, and often in places that seem, well, stupid. But he's good enough to get away with it.
I'm torn on Pogacar, because it's amazing performance, but also he wins so regularly that the seeming risks turn out never to be risks at all. It's like watching a Bond movie: you're never for a moment concerned that SPECTRE will come out ahead.
Yeah, he has kind of gone from young crazy attacking kid to "I'm better than everybody so why not?"
No player has hit four triples in a game since the 19th century. Willie McCovey hit two in his debut (he also hit one in game 7 of the 62 WS).
You left two guys out that deserve props:
- Roberto Clemente in the only player who is in the top 50 in career triples who played in the played in past 60 years (#he's #27). Playing home game at Forbes Field helps.
-Willie Wilson, the most exiting guy the past 50 years running after hitting the ball, not only triples, but inside-the-park HRs. He is #56 all time.
Incidentally, Konnor Griffin got off to a slow start (double in his first PA, then 14 outs plus a walk, etc), but he does already have 2 triples, and on Saturday he finished a homer shy of the cycle.
Apparently at home he trains on one of these high tech simulators that can match real pitchers' arsenals and replicate real ballparks, and he practiced hitting into the North Side Notch at PNC, which is tailor-made for generating triples. So maybe he'll generate some fun for the fans.
Also, I realize that Willie Wilson's % of triples/hits doesn't reach One Dog's (although if you throw in his 13 ITPHRs, he comes closer), but he led the league 5 times in triples like Johnson and in his first few years, no one hit triples like Willie. In 1979, he had 13 triples and 5 ITPHRs. In 1980 he had 15 triples and 2 ITPHRs and in 1982 he had 15 triples and another 3 ITPHRs. Some of that is due to Royals Stadium's unique corners to their outfield combined with artificial turf, but still Willie flying around the bases is something I have never seen duplicated.
Willie Wilson may well be the fastest player I've ever seen. But yeah, a lot of that is the park. For his career, he hit about 50% more triples at home than on the road, albeit a smaller edge during his younger years.
George Brett, to my memory, wasn't particularly fast. But he played hard, running out of the box on everything, something he got from the s-l-o-w Hal McRae. Brett lead the AL 3x in 3B and had a year with over 20. That turf in KC was something else back in the day.
Other fastest contender? Billy Hamilton was something else and it is great that he shares a name with Sliding Billy of the 1800s. Also, I wonder what Deion Sanders would have done had he devoted himself to the superior sport. A league leading 14 triples in '92 despite only 325 PAs. Twice second in the league in SB despite never being close to a full time player. The speed wasn't refined - he didn't get good jumps on the basepaths or tracking a fly ball. But my what could have been.
I was torn on Sanders (to me the trash talk & bravado didn't quite align with the actual performance) until he started wearing his uniform pants the old fashioned way in 1997 in honor of Jackie, which I thought was just awesome.
That was a weird season for him, incidentally: by far the most games played (115), but not very productive, going negative in the field and his worst hitting since his 1992 breakout. But the curious part is that A. he wasn't that old (only 29, although granted, he was burning the candle at both ends), and B. the decline was almost all power. His AVG & OBP were basically the same as years when he had much better OPS+, but his ISO dropped from .131 and better to .090. He actually had exactly 25 XBH in '95, '96, & '97, but it took ~100 more PAs to get there in '97.
There is a story, possibly true, about Sanders early in his career. He hit an infield pop-up and was just standing there not moving when Carlton Fisk barked at him about respecting the game. Sanders said something to Fisk about not being a slave and Fisk jumped in his face about how the greats from Jackie & Frank Robinson on down didn't consider it 'slavery' to be respectful to the game and their opponents.
At the time, I was firmly inside Carlton's camp. But I can see that story from both sides now. Fisk was more than a bit of a red-arse and policing demeanor of the other side is a jackwagon move. It is, however, also clear that Pudge got every ounce of performance out of his less than gifted body. (And may well have been helped along the way by being an early advocate of weight training -- and the (ahem) supplements those lifters were using.)
Bo Jackson was probably faster than them all, but his high was only 6, all be it in a limited sample size.
Willie Wilson just had that perfect lean running the bases, plus he was pretty tall and the long legs probably helps legging out extra bases.
Sam Crawford, at 6'0", was also tall for his era.
In a similar vein is Bo Jackson. Football speed and baseball speed are just different things. Anyway, my proof of Bo's speed is his first major league hit. An infield hit. On a routine ground ball to second base.
If I wasn't around during the Bo years, I simply wouldn't believe it. Sidd Finch in the flesh.
I'm surprised Joe didn't quote George Foster on the matter:
“I don't know why people like the home run so much. A home run is over as soon as it starts.... The triple is the most exciting play of the game. A triple is like meeting a woman who excites you, spending the evening talking and getting more excited, then taking her home. It drags on and on. You're never sure how it's going to turn out.”
The only cycle I've ever seen was Jason Kendall at Three Rivers. He came up in the 8th or 9th, the proverbial triple shy of the cycle, and smacked one to IIRC right-center. It wasn't an obvious triple ball, but he wanted it, and I can still picture him flying around the bases and flopping into 3rd. Crowd was going absolutely nuts because, again, the triple is the most exciting play in baseball.
There are 25 ways to score from third that can't be accomplished from second. Joe Morgan was always preaching getting to third base if possible.
OK, this is weird: I was under the impression that passed balls were up due to catchers changing position to improve framing. But I checked, and they're down significantly over the past 10 years, from 381 in 2017 to 233 in 2025. Wild pitches are down as well, so it's not a shift in how scorers are seeing things.
But here's the weird part: annual variation is small, but there've been stair-step changes. Here are the PB numbers starting in 2017 (skipping 2020): 381, 370, 349, 349, 231, 232, 239, 233. There are hundreds of thousands of pitches a year, it seems impossible to have almost the exact same number of passed balls from year to year. And wild pitches are similar: 1810, 1847, 1788 ,1862, 1607, 1613, 1439, 1430.
What on earth happened between 2021 (2211 balls going to the backstop) and 2022 (1838 combined)? That's a 17% reduction between years, and then 2022 has almost the exact same total (1845 combined). It's bizarre.
That fact was noted in the comment section a month or so back. BR Ed B. (I think) showed the data for both PB and WP going back a while. The inflection point *seemed* to come when catchers crossed the rubicon and began to be in the one-knee down stance more than half the time, something counter-intuitive to me as I would have thought that decreased mobility. But I couldn't offer a different potential cause (reduction in use of split finger fastballs?, change in equipment? ...) that would be so dramatic.
Oh man, I missed that completely. I agree completely with your intuition, and the only way I can square it is that way more passed balls than we thought were going through the 5-hole, which essentially no longer exists. Because there's simply no way that the one-knee stance allows as much lateral movement.
Yeah ... the comment section is wonderful. But not a great repository for research of that nature. Myself absolutely excluded, we have some truly Brilliant BRs. With no index to the best of the comments.
One other factor in Wahoo Sam's Triples. Many of the parks they played in before 1910 had no walls at all. There is no question in my mind, many of Wahoo Sam's triples were "power triples". Had walls existed he probably would have a lot fewer triples and a LOT more HRs/doubles.