Lately, the Yankees have had a rash of runners thrown out at the plate, third-base coach Bobby Meacham pinwheeling them on to their doom. In the recently concluded A’s series, somehow a sweep for the Yankees, it seemed as if they were being gunned down at home, batter after batter. I was curious if this was real or just an impression, so I asked our own Bil “Statsman” Burke to rustle up a ranking of teams by runners thrown out at the plate. These are honest-to-goodness, catcher-applies the tag plays, not force-outs on bases loaded grounders or anything like that. Here’s what he came up with.
In the following, Out is the total number of outs. The next three columns show what base the runner started from: B = Batter, which is to say home plate; F = First base, S = Second base, T = Third. The final column shows each team’s current third-base coach. We can’t generalize about the third base coaches from this data given that so many factors are in play here, from runners ignoring stop signs or falling down or the game state, but it is interesting that the number of chances a team takes doesn’t seem to correspond to the quality of its offense.
Team Out B F S T Coach
ANA 16 1 2 4 9 Dino Ebel
PHI 16 1 4 2 9 Steve Smith
BAL 14 0 2 4 8 Juan Samuel
NYA 13 0 1 7 5 Bobby Meacham
TBA 13 0 0 7 6 Tom Foley
MIN 13 0 3 3 7 Scott Ullger
SLN 13 0 1 3 9 Jose Oquendo
HOU 13 0 4 3 6 Ed Romero
LAN 13 0 1 3 9 Larry Bowa
DET 12 0 0 7 5 Gene Lamont
ARI 12 1 0 5 6 Chip Hale
SDN 12 0 2 3 7 Glenn Hoffman
CIN 12 0 3 2 7 Mark Berry
BOS 12 0 1 4 7 DeMarlo Hale
SEA 12 1 2 1 8 Sam Perlozzo
PIT 12 0 2 6 4 Tony Beasley
TOR 12 0 3 4 5 Nick Leyva
WAS 11 0 2 7 2 Tim Tolman
KCA 11 0 2 4 5 Luis Silverio
CLE 11 0 4 4 3 Joel Skinner
CHN 11 0 2 2 7 Mike Quade
OAK 10 0 1 3 6 Tony DeFrancesco
MIL 9 0 2 2 5 Dave Sveum
TEX 9 0 1 2 6 Matt Walbeck
COL 9 0 2 3 4 Mike Gallego
ATL 9 0 0 4 5 Brian Snitker
FLO 8 0 4 2 2 Bo Porter
SFN 8 0 0 4 4 Tim Flannery
NYN 8 1 2 1 4 Luis Aguayo
CHA 7 0 0 4 3 Jeff Cox
TOTAL 341 5 53 110 173
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