Outstanding Mogridge T207 back run from Val. Thanks for posting!
Player #74F: Edgar C. "Sam" Rice. Outfielder for the Washington Senators in 1915-1933. 2,987 hits and 34 home runs in 20 MLB seasons. 1924 World Series champion. 1920 AL stolen base leader. He was inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame in 1963. Led the Senators to three AL pennants (1924,1925, and 1933). Best known for controversial "over the fence" catch in the 1925 World Series. He had many excellent seasons, but one of his best was 1930 as he posted a .407 OBP with 121 runs scored in 669 plate appearances. He had 63 stolen bases in 1920. He last played in 1934 with the Cleveland Indians. His early life was marred by tragedy when his wife, two daughters, parents, and two sisters were all killed by a tornado in Indiana.
Carroll explains how baseball strategies were evolving in 1921, much to the chagrin of oldtimers (a process that continues 100 years later): Though Rice's 1921 season was another success at the plate, he did see a huge drop off in one part of his game -- stolen bases. After leading the American League with sixty-three steals in 1920, Rice stole just twenty-six bases the following season, fourth in the league. . . .
. . . Base-stealing had been losing popularity even before the live-ball era made it a graver risk for a manager to risk outs on the bases. In 1911, the New York Giants had stolen 347 bases as a team. By 1920, the Giants total was down to 131. . . . By the late 1910s the Senators didn't run as often as they did before, either, but they still were running more than most teams. Clark Griffith was the reason. . . .
He was, of course, lucky enough to have Rice and Clyde Milan at his disposal. . . . Many decades later, the baseball thinker Bill James would (demonstrate that) . . . base stealing . . . Only positively influences a lineup's ability to score runs when it is successful more than seventy percent of the time. . . . Of course, in the early 1920s Clark Griffith wasn't armed with (James') formulas . . . But he believed he'd seen enough baseball to grasp when was a good time to run and when it might get a team into trouble. . . .
Baseball writers lamented the decline of base-stealing, feeling that suddenly conservative managers were extracting much of the color and excitement out of the game. . . . Rice blamed his fall-off in stolen bases to the trend of "freak deliveries." According to Rice, the deliveries themselves weren't so much responsible for the stolen base drought as their impact on the pitcher's repertoire of pitches. As they are today, curveballs were the easiest pitch to steal on . . . But in 1921, said Rice, pitchers were throwing far less curveballs, relying more on their delivery deception to throw hitters off rhythm. . . .
. . . Ultimately, most purists accepted the demise of the stolen base as a primary offensive weapon. "Under conditions such as they are at present, where pitching is indifferent and almost every batter is a potential slugger, the home run is always a possibility," one such purist wrote. "And before this imminent prospect the manager is prone to throw into the discard such relatively feeble efforts as the stolen base . . . Why should this base-runner risk getting caught at second when the next man up may knock out a two-bagger or a homer?" (Sam Rice by Jeff Carroll.)
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