Skip to footer

Baseball 2012: The game's best off-beat, under-the-radar statistics and trivia

Fascinating baseball firsts and notable statistics can easily be missed in the playing of more than 2,000 big-league games each year. Here are the most intriguing developments that possibly escaped your notice.

9. No red light against Rangers

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

The opponents of the Texas Rangers stole 24 bases in a row without being caught.

Backstory: The string of 24 straight successful steal attempts against them during a late-season streak underscored perhaps the greatest vulnerability for Texas in advancing to a third straight World Series. The Rangers not only fail to discourage base-stealers, they haven’t been good in stealing bases themselves. 

The Rangers have only succeeded in throwing out about 20 percent of the runners who try stealing against them, one of the worst success rates in the majors. Meanwhile they’ve stolen about 50 fewer bases this year than in 2011 and were caught a higher percentage of the time. 

The defensive weakness is a far cry from when Ivan Rodriguez, one of the finest defensive catchers of all-time, was a fixture for the Rangers from 1991 to 2002. He ended his career with the best caught-stealing percentage of any major-leaguer catcher with 45.68 percent success rate. While the current Texas backstops are no I-Rods, they haven’t gotten much help from the Ranger pitchers, who aren't good when it comes to holding runners on base.

9 of 12
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.