The New All-Time Triples List

From generation to generation, the shape, tenor, and texture of baseball inevitably transforms and evolves into something that the forefathers of bygone eras would be hard-pressed to recognize. For instance: the thought of a major league team flying commercial on road trips, as Jim Bouton’s Seattle Pilots did in the hilarious Ball Four, reads like a joke to modern minds. Even major leaguers played an event called the World Series in the opening years of the 20th century, the flimsy, finger-length gloves and the baggy wool uniforms make those games seem a lot closer, on the evolutionary scale, to baseball’s medieval origins than to what we see when we flick on Extra Innings.

We know, as fans, when and how to mentally adjust the vaunted all-time record book to account for these generational changes. We will never hold it against modern pitchers, for example, that they are   unable to break Cy Young’s record of 511 pitcher wins — or even that they are unable to approach Walter Johnson’s second-best 417 wins. Being a professional pitcher today requires total, year-round physical and emotional commitment from the nation’s — the world’s — best athletes, and the very best of those are barely able to inch up over 200 innings pitched in a season. We know this.

The modern wizard of the mound, Clayton Kershaw, has both an early start in the majors (debut at age 20), and an impeccable (so far, knock on wood) record of health — both necessities if a player is going to make a run at an all-time record. And still, at Kershaw’s current average of 16 wins a year, it would take him until his age-51 season to catch Young. It will even take him until his age-38 season to cross the currently revered 300-win threshold — and it’s entirely possible, in the coming years, that Kershaw convinces us that he is the game’s best-ever pitcher even without this particular statistical achievement.

It’s time to apply this same generational-adjustment wisdom to another corner of the record book — a forgotten corner of the record book. Forgotten, perhaps, precisely because it is so totally dominated by scowling, pre-war, pre-integration old-timers: the all-time triples list.

Here is how the all-time top 10 list currently stands:

All-Time Career Triples Leaderboard

Player	Final season	Triples
Ty Cobb	1928	295
Sam Crawford	1917	287
Tris Speaker	1928	222
Honus Wagner	1917	210
Paul Waner	1945	191
Eddie Collins	1930	187
Sam Rice	1934	184
Edd Roush	1931	182
Ed Konetchy	1921	182
Stan Musial	1963	177

Clearly, there were elements of the early-20th-century game that gave triples an opportunity to flourish. I can think of a few possible factors, since gone extinct, that probably blended together to create such a triples-happy environment.

The first, and biggest reason? The outfield dimensions. All-time leader Ty Cobb played most of his career at Tiger Stadium, where the center field wall was 467 feet from home plate. That would make it a lot more difficult for outfielders to break off frozen ropes like this on the fly (note the 347-foot marker in that video).

Today’s immaculately researched pre-series scouting report on its own has no doubt been responsible for killing off so many triples: “Plus arm; don’t run on this guy.” This is a bad thing only if you are expressly concerned with filling the game with as many triples as possible.

I’m also thinking about how the dead-ball era ball would ricochet around the old-timey outfields. These are game balls that are definitely not getting swapped out after every pitch in the dirt, foul ball, spitball. I’m imagining some lumpy, torn, tobacco-covered baseballs devilishly dodging so many poor outfielders who could only so much as guess which direction the about-to-be-triple would skip to next.

Then there’s the outfields themselves. The bright emerald sheets of patterned grass that look oh so glorious each and every time we walk from the concourse to our section…well, these groundskeeping marvels didn’t really exist (I’m assuming) back then. I’m imagining a lot of dirt clods back in the early 1900s outfields — which of course the ball would find like a heat-seeking missile. And, also, while modern fan interference consists of reaching over the outfield wall from on top of a 15-foot turret, back in the day we had configurations where fans lined the entire outfield, standing and sitting right at ground-level. If the home team was up to bat and a ground ball hopped its way into the stands — well, it was probably difficult for the two-man umpiring crew to enforce the game’s rules down to the letter.

In the post-integration era (1947-present), the top ten triplers look like a much more recognizable list. Much like the all-time stolen bases leaderboard, this triples list skews heavy to the ’70s and ’80s — a generation in which speed (aided by the onslaught of Astroturf) was actually an offensive priority for teams:

Career Triples Leaderboard, 1947-Present

Player	Triples	Career Games	Career PA	PA/Triple
Roberto Clemente	161	2433	10,211	63.4
Willie Wilson	147	2154	8,317	56.6
Lou Brock	141	2616	11,240	79.7
Willie Mays	140	2992	12,496	89.3
George Brett	137	2707	11,625	84.9
Pete Rose	135	3562	15,890	117.7
Brett Butler	131	2213	9,545	72.8
Vada Pinson	127	2470	10,402	81.9
Robin Yount	126	2856	12,249	97.2

Although Clemente tops the list by a comfortable margin, Wilson also has a comfortable lead in terms of frequency of triples. As with any cumulative record, appearing on this list is also a byproduct of career longevity. Rose, Mays and Yount are top-20 all-time in total games played, with Brett and Brock also showing up in the top 50.

I think this is a much more appealing list to have in mind as a barometer for tripling greatness.

While the post-integration top 10 doesn’t include any active players, a few active players are knocking  on the door. Their progress shows that Clemente’s mark, while extremely difficult to attain (obviously), is not impossible — a la Cy Young’s win total — to reach for in the modern game. Let’s take a look at the active top 10, which includes a surprise star tripler who’s still in his 20s:

Career Triples Leaderboard, Active Players

Player	Triples	Career Games	Career PA	PA/Triple
Carl Crawford	120	1617	6898	57.5
Jose Reyes	115	1446	6630	57.7
Jimmy Rollins	111	2090	9511	85.7
Ichiro Suzuki	85	2204	9663	113.7
Curtis Granderson	82	1342	5698	69.5
Carlos Beltran	77	2173	9398	112.1
Shane Victorino	68	1228	4960	72.9
David DeJesus	63	1360	5599	88.9
Michael Bourn	61	1107	4428	72.6
Dexter Fowler	57	783	3140	55.1

Crawford — who currently has more than 1,000 fewer career games played than Yount — is about to pass the legendary Brewer on the all-time list. Alas, Crawford will probably close that six-triple gap more slowly than you think. Since he left Tampa Bay, Crawford’s tripling prowess has fallen off the same way as the rest of his game. As a Devil Ray/Ray, Crawford averaged a historically elite 51.4 PAs per triple, including leading the American League in total triples three years in a row (2004-2006). In Crawford’s four big-money years since his gigantic contract with the Boston Red Sox in free agency, Crawford has tripled only about half as often, or once every 100.2 plate appearances. Throw in Crawford’s health problems over the same four seasons (a wilted average of 96 games played per season), and only 15 of his 120 career triples have come in a Red Sox or Dodgers uniform. That big ol’ contract runs through 2017, which means Crawford should pass Yount and Pinson and maybe Butler — but don’t expect much more than that unless Crawford gains access to a real-live Fountain of Youth.

Reyes has followed a frightfully similar triples career arc. During his nine seasons as a Met and his one season as a Marlin, Reyes was at an astounding 50.1 PAs per triple, a touch better than even Crawford in his prime. In his two seasons as a Blue Jay, Reyes is down to, um, one triple every 268.5 PAs. This is most likely a result of Reyes’ ankle and hamstring injuries. Whatever the reason, at age 31, Reyes’ best tripling days are probably behind him.

Granderson, despite his stellar career tripling rate, is another player whose tripling has cooled off significantly with age. After the 2007 season, Granderson’s second full year in the majors, he looked like a shoo-in to be one of the game’s great all-time triplers. That year, Granderson went for 23 triples, which led the league and was nearly twice the triples that third-place Reyes managed (12). Even more impressively: nobody had hit that many triples in one season since Dale Mitchell for the 1949 Cleveland Indians. Clemente, Mays, Wilson — none of them matched the bar that Granderson set for triples in a season. But Granderson’s slow pace since those early years makes him a long shot to get to just 100. Perhaps the pursuit of power has sapped Granderson’s triples totals: since becoming a Yankee in 2010, he’s had two 40+-homer seasons, but his triple rate has fallen to once every 112.1 PAs.

Ultimately, it looks like the player on the active leaderboard with the best shot at dethroning Clemente is Dexter Fowler. With Fowler, though, there’s a hidden but large factor that could keep him from  approaching the all-time greats despite his so-far torrid pace: he doesn’t play his home games at Coors Field anymore.

While Coors is the majors’ most notorious bandbox because of how fly balls travel through that thin, mile-high air, the pushed-back fences also make Coors the majors’ best place to get a triple. If an outfielder misplays a ball — the origin of a good portion of modern triples — in a ballpark with a short porch, like the Baltimore Orioles’ Camden Yards (318 feet down the right field line) or at Yankee Stadium (314 feet in right), the ball will go only so far before hitting the wall and maybe even ricocheting back to the fielder. In Coors, though, misplayed balls — or balls that dance just on the fair side of the foul line — have an additional 40-50 feet in each direction to roll in the opposite direction of the rapidly churning baserunner. That’s a lot of space! It’s definitely enough space to stretch a likely double into a stand-up triple, as Fowler has personally done plenty of times. Since 2002, no team has hit more triples in its home park than the Rockies have in theirs — nearly three times the number of triples that the Orioles and Yankees have hit at home over the same span.

This ballpark effect has had a huge influence on Fowler’s elite tripling. Even though Fowler has played 42.5 percent of his career games at Coors, 57.8 percent of his career triples have come in Colorado. While Fowler’s new home of Wrigley Field has relatively deep corners (355 to left and 353 to right), the relatively shallow 400-foot dead-center could be a big factor in slowing down Fowler’s tripling in his last season before he hits free agency. The Cubs’ 2014 triples park factor was slightly lower than that of Houston, and was significantly lower than Colorado. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that Fowler signs with a team in a triples-friendly ballpark when he reaches the free-agent market.

The active players with perhaps the best chance at busting Clemente’s record are first- and second-year players who have stormed out of the gate with some high-frequency tripling. Obviously they have a long, long way to go to catch Clemente, who set his record because his tripling rate in his 30s (once every 53.7 PAs) was actually better than his tripling rate in his 20s (69.5). But at least these young guns have taken the necessary first step to track down Clemente:

Career Triples, Select Young Players

Player	Triples	Career Games	Career PA	PA/Triple
Starling Marte	22	317	1293	58.8
Adam Eaton	16	211	918	57.4
Corey Dickerson	11	200	691	62.8
David Peralta	9	88	348	38.7
Kevin Kiermaier	8	109	364	45.5
Rougned Odor	7	114	417	59.6

There are already some pretty rad tripling exploits among these young players. Odor has already had a two–triple day, and Kiermaier hit two triples in two innings. Dickerson — who has hit 100 percent of his triples in Coors — had a two-triple day that included a walk-off triple in the bottom of the 15th. (Dickerson has also fallen on his face trying to stretch a triple into a Little League home run in one of the all-round ugliest plays you’ll ever see in the majors.)

The clear sentimental favorite, though, because of both the Pirates connection and also because of his universal appeal as a totally awesome ballplayer, is Marte. We probably don’t yet know the ceiling on Marte’s career on the whole, and the same goes for his potential as a tripler. Already, Marte has accomplished such feats as hitting a triple in three consecutive games, and he’s also had the ultra-rare walk-off triple via overturned replay. (Also, somehow, Marte has earned a triple not once but twice as a result of having Peter Bourjos misplay a ball.)

We don’t have to not care about triples just because of the generationally inflated totals posted by the likes of Cobb and Wagner. From elder statesmen Crawford and Reyes to younger dudes like Fowler and Marte, there are plenty of historically great triplers churning up the basepaths in front of our eyes.