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Bad Outs

By Dave Fleming

June 10, 2021

In 1990, White Sox outfielder Iván Calderon led the league in grounding into a double play, hitting into 26 rally-killers. He was also caught stealing 16 times.

Backing up: the genesis for this article was very random: I saw Ivan Calderon’s face on the top left-hand corner of the Baseball-Reference page, and I realized I hadn’t ever looked at his career. I had no idea how many homers he had ended up with, or where he had played his final games, or what his career batting totals looked like. 213 homers? Didn’t he wind up in Toronto?

Calderon hit far fewer homerun that I would’ve imagined: 102. That’s surprising. I think that I first noticed Calderon when he hit 28 homeruns for the White Sox in 1987. He was twenty-five years old, and you would expect a young player who hits 28 homeruns right before offensive numbers steroided into the stratosphere to collect a decent number of career dingers. But Calderon’s career was short: he was out of the majors by thirty-two.

And he’s gone: he was murdered in a bar in Puerto Rico in 2003, when he was just forty-one years old. I have no useful insights into that, of course.

Returning to Ivan Calderon’s 1990 season: those 26 GIDP’s represent the only Black Ink on his Baseball-Reference page, the only time he led the league in a category. That is what drew my eyes, of course: twenty-six is an impressive number of double plays for a hitter to ground into. He was also caught stealing sixteen times. That ain’t great.

On that subject: Calderon had an unusual record as a base stealer:

Year	Age	Games	SB	CS
1987	25	144	10	5
1988	26	73	4	4
1989	27	157	7	1
1990	28	158	32	16
1991	29	134	31	16

For his first three years as baserunner, Calderon didn’t run too often, and he had a poor record when he did. Then - mid-career - he suddenly started running. He didn’t change teams, and the team didn’t change managers or GM’s: he just started running. He went from eight stolen base attempts to forty-eight attempts, for no obvious reason.

Anyway: I sometimes think of double-plays and caught stealing as ‘twin’ events, though they are exactly parallel. They are Bad Outs: they are events that typically swing a team’s chances from the positive to the negative. They’re take-the-wind-out-of-the-sails outs.

When I saw that Calderon had grounded into 26 stolen bases and had been caught stealing 16 times, I thought, reflexively: "Forty-two outs seems like an awful lot of bad outs."

And then I thought: is it?

Other questions followed. What is the record for bad outs in a season? What is the range for bad outs…what is the ‘bad out’ equivalent of a .300 batting average or a WAR of 6.0? What kind of players tend to make a lot of bad outs: are they sluggers or base stealers? Are they good players or great players or flameouts? Who is the career record holder in bad outs? Who made the most bad outs per plate appearance?

So let’s get take a deep dive it on a not-very-meaningful stat.

Let’s look into BO.

* * *

The records for caught stealing and grounding into double plays are sporadic until 1939, when both leagues started counting the events. The FanGraphs data base has AL Caught Stealing data from 1939, but their NL data only starts after 1951, so we’re only looking at the last seventy years.

And to narrow my spreadsheet a little, I kept my list to players who had at least 300 plate appearances: I assumed that no one with fewer than 300 plate appearances would crack our list. That gave us a list of 15,315 individual seasons to choose from.

Any guess at the #1 season? I bet most of you can guess the worst BO season of all-time.

It’s Rickey, of course. He is the single-season record holder for Bad Outs. In 1982, he set a record by getting caught stealing 43 times. He also grounded in five double plays, tallying 47 Bad Outs.

Ivan Calderon had 42 bad outs, which is close to 47. How close was he to the record?

Very, very close:

Season	Name	Team	G	PA	GDP	CS	Bad Outs
1982	Rickey Henderson	OAK	149	656	5	42	47
1999	Ivan Rodriguez	TEX	144	630	31	12	43
1990	Ivan Calderon	CHW	158	667	26	16	42
1980	Omar Moreno	PIT	162	745	9	33	42
1974	Lou Brock	STL	153	702	8	33	41
2002	Vlad Guerrero	MON	161	709	20	20	40
2001	Vlad Guerrero	MON	159	671	24	16	40
1993	Chad Curtis	CAL	152	671	16	24	40

Ivan Calderon had the third-worst season for ‘bad outs’ in baseball history.

That’s remarkable. Sixteen thousand individual seasons of baseball players hitting into double plays and getting caught stealing, and I happen to notice the third worst season? Weird.

We are early in our dive, but one thing that pops up is that these are good players.

Rickey, Ivan Rodriguez, Lou Brock, and Vladdie Sr are all in the baseball Hall-of-Fame. Moreno and Calderon were good players. Chad Curtis: let’s just leave it that there are names that make you wince when they show up on a table.

These are runners more than hitters, which isn’t surprising. You can tally a lot of CS if you play for a manager who gives you the green light every time you’re on first base. Brock and Henderson and Moreno were speedsters. Pudge was fast-for-a-catcher…maybe the fastest catcher who stuck at the position. Guerrero and Calderon were more power hitters than speedsters, but they weren’t plodders.

But if you look further down the list, the speedsters don’t continue to dominate the table:

Season	Name	Team	G	PA	GDP	CS	Bad Outs
1953	Minnie Minoso	CHW	151	655	23	16	39
1985	Dave Parker	CIN	160	694	26	13	39
1992	Luis Polonia	CAL	149	635	18	21	39
2008	Miguel Tejada	HOU	158	666	32	7	39
1954	Jackie Jensen	BOS	152	673	32	7	39
1976	Lou Brock	STL	133	544	19	19	38
1978	Lyman Bostock	CAL	147	637	26	12	38
1988	Harold Reynolds	SEA	158	663	9	29	38
1983	Steve Sax	LAD	155	692	8	30	38

Minnie Minoso was fast, but there was a lot more to his game than speed. Dave Parker – the 1985 version of Dave Parker – was big and burly. Jensen and Miguel Tejada and Lyman Bostock collected most of their Bad Outs on grounding into double plays, not getting caught stealing.

Of course, those numbers are cumulative numbers, not rates. The list has good players because good players will have more opportunities to hit into double plays or get caught stealing. There is a reason Rickey is number one: he was an exceptionally great baseball player.

* * *

So what happens if we look at the rate of Bad Outs?

Adjusting for Bad Outs Per 100 Plate Appearances knocks Rickey from the top of the list:

Season	Name	Team	PA	GDP	CS	Bad Outs	BO/100 PA
1976	Jim Wohlford	KCR	334	8	16	24	7.19
1982	Rickey Henderson	OAK	656	5	42	47	7.16
1991	Bernard Gilkey	STL	311	14	8	22	7.07
1995	Kevin Bass	BAL	327	15	8	23	7.03
1976	Lou Brock	STL	544	19	19	38	6.99
1982	John Wathan	KCR	502	26	9	35	6.97
1943	Jimmy Bloodworth	DET	519	29	7	36	6.94
1950	Billy Hitchcock	PHA	447	30	1	31	6.94
1961	Gene Green	WAS	405	26	2	28	6.91
1953	Carlos Bernier	PIT	366	11	14	25	6.83
1999	Ivan Rodriguez	TEX	630	31	12	43	6.83
1975	Duane Kuiper	CLE	388	8	18	26	6.70
2002	Brad Ausmus	HOU	496	30	3	33	6.65
2010	Ivan Rodriguez	WSN	421	25	3	28	6.65
1979	George Scott	- - -	384	24	1	25	6.51

Jim Wohlford, a backup outfielder for the 1976 pennant-winning Royals, edges out Rickey Henderson: he rises to the top of our list.

Mr. Wohlford is still alive on this earth, and I’m betting that he doesn’t know that he is ahead of the great Rickey Henderson, at least by one very specific and ignominious metric. If anyone has a line to him, please reach out and share the good news.

What really happens when you look at Bad Outs by rate is that the good players drop off, and lesser players (or good players in lesser years) start filling in the gaps. I don’t know anything about Jimmy Bloodworth or Carlos Beiner. Kevin Bass and George Scott were fine players in their primes, but this chart gives us the last season of each man’s career, when both were playing out the string. Bernand Gilkey is the other side of the coin: he would go on to have a few strong seasons in the majors, but this is his first extended sting in the big leagues, and he was probably trying to do too much.

* * *

How about career contributions?

Starting with careers of 5000+ plate appearances, here are the hitters credited with the most Bad Outs, by rate:

Name	PA	GDP	CS	BO	BO/100
Luis Polonia	5296	91	145	236	4.46
Otis Nixon	5800	72	186	258	4.45
Eric Young	6996	135	168	303	4.33
Pat Kelly	5011	97	119	216	4.31
Juan Beniquez	5151	146	76	222	4.31
Julio Franco	9731	310	107	417	4.29
Cesar Cedeno	8133	167	179	346	4.25
Steve Sax	7632	146	178	324	4.25
Tony Pena	7073	235	63	298	4.21
Omar Moreno	5481	45	182	227	4.14
Vlad Guerrero	9059	278	94	372	4.11
Enos Cabell	6304	133	124	257	4.08
George Scott	8269	279	57	336	4.06
Minnie Minoso	7690	183	129	312	4.06
Jackie Jensen	6001	182	55	237	3.95

Burners, mostly. Speed-first players. It’s surprising to see Julio Franco, one of my all-time favorite players, on this list. Tony Pena never struck me as a liability, but…he gives the catchers representation. Vlad Guerrero isn’t a surprise, considering that he’s already had some appearances.

What about the players who avoid bad outs? Whose the best at that?

Name	PA	GDP	CS	BO	BO/100
Matt Carpenter	5095	35	17	52	1.02
Chris Davis	5630	62	11	73	1.30
C. Granderson	8306	64	50	114	1.37
Roger Maris	5846	75	9	84	1.44
Chase Utley	7863	93	22	115	1.46
Adam Dunn	8328	100	25	125	1.50
Mickey Mantle	9909	113	38	151	1.52
Carlos Pena	5893	71	22	93	1.58
Eddie Mathews	10101	123	39	162	1.60
Mike Trout	5660	58	37	95	1.68
Norm Siebern	5267	64	25	89	1.69
Don Blasingame	5938	43	60	103	1.73
Dan Uggla	5509	75	21	96	1.74
Willie Stargell	9026	143	16	159	1.76
Will Clark	8283	100	48	148	1.79

This is an unusual list of players, starting with an unusual hitter in Matt Carpenter.

I will confess that I haven’t followed Carpenter’s career as closely as I perhaps should have. He’s a player that doesn’t fit an easy category: a leadoff hitter who doesn’t run, an on-base player who had decent power but strikes out, a defender who can play a lot of positions passably, but not brilliantly. He’s hard to categorize. He could be viewed as paralleling Will Clark, who comes in at 15^th.

Chris Davis is #2. That’s easier to categorize: pull sluggers who strike out too much to ground into double plays. Him and Adam Dunn and Carlos Pena.

Curtis Granderson was a favorite player of mine: an underrated player who did a lot to help his teams win. There are players like Granderson who show up doing well by this metric: Brett Gardner (22^nd), Jayson Werth (27^th), Jason Bay (28^th), J.D. Drew (32^nd), Tim Salmon (34^th), Shane Victorino (51^st). This metric is good at identifying lesser known players who won games by making good baseball decisions.

Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris – the M&M Boys - both show up as a player who avoided Bad Outs: I was surprised to see both of them on the list. Yogi Berra is also terrific at avoiding Bad Outs: he ranks 43^rd among the players listed.

Chase Utley’s appearance does not surprise me: he was an absolutely terrific percentage player. The same holds for Mike Trout.

* * *

All-Time Leaders? Ok.

Name	PA	GDP	CS	BO
R. Henderson	13346	173	335	508
Albert Pujols	12542	406	41	447
C. Yastrzemski	13991	323	116	439
Lou Brock	11238	114	307	421
Julio Franco	9731	310	107	417
Dave Winfield	12358	319	96	415
Rod Carew	10550	216	186	402
Hank Aaron	13940	328	73	401
Ivan Rodriguez	10270	337	64	401
Pete Rose	15876	247	149	396
Cal Ripken	12883	350	39	389
Tony Gwynn	10232	261	125	386
Derek Jeter	12602	287	96	383
D. Concepcion	9641	266	109	375
Omar Vizquel	12013	207	167	374
V. Guerrero	9059	278	94	372
Torii Hunter	9692	262	99	361
Eddie Murray	12817	315	43	358
Willie Mays	12493	251	103	354
Miguel Cabrera	10648	329	21	350

Mostly Hall-of-Fame players, as you could guess.

* * *

Well, OK. We’re about done here. Just one more thing.

Has any player ever have a season without getting caught stealing or grounding into a double play?

I actually went further back, checking the records all the way from 1939. That was a sample of 16,000 individual seasons. And there was one player, anonymous to all but the most discerning baseball fan, who accomplished this feat.

Let’s let a skeptic ask a few questions about our mystery man.

You set the bar at 300 plate appearances: I’m guessing this player must’ve just clipped that bar.

This player, while not playing a full season, managed to collect 430 plate appearances. He didn’t cheap out on plate appearance.

Fine. He was a plodding power hitter who struck out a billion times. Never thought of stealing second base. Sam Horn. Rob Deer. Gorman Thomas

No. This man was a runner. He attempted fourteen stolen bases, which was good enough to finish 19^th in the league in the year he accomplished this feat. He was a perfect 14-for-14.

So it’s slap-hitter. Punch-and-judy singles hitter. A bunting expert like Billy Butler, or a contact-first hitter.

No. He hit 16 homeruns, so he showed at least some capacity to hit the ball hard. He wasn’t a contact specialist, either: he struck out 123 times.

Okay: this is a crafty player. Rickey ran into a lot of outs with Billy Martin, and then learned to choose his moments. Same for Beltran. Middle-career, great player, right?

No. This player pulled this feat off as a rookie. First season in the majors.

Then this is some anonymous player from some era where weird things happen. A World War II, player, or someone who snuck up on an expansion squad and bounced around for a few years.

No. He is a starting player on a team that was in the playoffs last year.

So what gives?

It’s genes. It has to be something in the genetic code. That’s the only explanation.

The only player to never ground into a double play or get caught stealing is Cavan Biggio. He accomplished this feat in 2019, his rookie season, when he went 14-for-14 in stolen bases while never grounding into a double play.

And his father, Hall-of-Famer Craig Biggio, was also famously good at avoiding bad outs: in 1997 Craig become just the third player to have a full season without hitting into a double play, and the first to do it while playing in all of his team’s games.

The younger Biggio is just starting his career, but he is well head of his father (2.19 BO, good enough for 76^th all-time), and he’s certainly in line to challenge Matt Carpenter’s record. Carpenter has averaged 1.02 Bad Outs per 100 PA: Cavan is sitting at 0.59 through 846 plate appearances (one caught stealing, four GIDP).

The apple is outpacing the tree.

David Fleming is a writer living in southwest Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.

COMMENTS (16 Comments, most recent shown first)

RichEddy44
Not quite. He used stolen base percentage and some other stuff, but it wasn’t a total of anything like the total outs we’re measuring here.
5:13 PM Jun 17th

3for3
Rich: I think Bill did something like that. He called it being a good or bad percentage player.
11:14 AM Jun 16th

DaveFleming
I laughed out loud, OBS. I've actually had to kill a pet bunny rabbit once: it wasn't fun. That was a strange google search: 'what is the most humane way to kill a rabbit?'
11:59 AM Jun 14th

RichEddy44
So you’re combining 1 hitting stat with 1 baserunning stat. How about going for the trifecta and adding a fielding stat: errors. Those are bad outs for the defense. The drawback is that now the leaders would all be 2B, 3B, SS.
7:27 PM Jun 13th

OBS2.0
Hi Dave,

Gawd. Reading your stuff is like listening in my head to a cat in a blender mixed with nails on a blacboard mixed with a baby rabbit being murdered.

Anyway, the leap in SBs from with the ChiSox from 1989 to 1990 was interesting. Team SBs went from 97 to 140. Sammy Sosa went from 16 to 32, and Lance Johnson had his first big year with 36.

The White Sox moved feom tenth in the league in steals to 3rd -- and only 1 in back of the 2nd place team. (Torborg felt the need. The need for speed....)
12:33 PM Jun 12th

DaveFleming
Oh, I only mean that they're 'bad' for the prospect of scoring. A guy gets on first, and you sit up a little thinking this could be something. He gets caught stealing or the next guy grounds into a double play, you feel the wind come out of the sails. They're bad outs in that regard.

They're not always 'bad' baseball. I very much think baseball would be better off if it had players like Rickey going 130-for-170 on stolen bases. I 1000% advocate that.

And thanks for the kind words, Gfletch. It is certainly not a gift: I am not a natural in any way at 'ritten.
6:22 PM Jun 11th

steve161
Carlos Bernier, how long since I've heard that name. He makes this list from his single season in the majors on the strength of being caught on 14 of 29 attempted steals, but I remember him as a speedy outfielder for the Hollywood Stars from 1952-57, a pretty good hitter without much power. I see on BBRef that he went with the Stars to Salt Lake City when the Dodgers shoved the Stars and Angels out of Los Angeles, and played in the minors until the age of 38, all but the last year in AAA. He returned to his native Puerto Rico, where he died in 1989 at age 62.

When I look at the Hollywood rosters from the fifties, I draw a blank on most of the names. I wonder why I remember Bernier.
5:50 PM Jun 11th

DanaKing
As always, this is an interesting, well-written, and well-researched article. I have a problem with the premise. Those are outs you'd rather not make, but they are also not necessarily the result of "bad" baseball. For years Henry Aaron had the all-time record for GIDP; he might still. All it really meant was he hit the ball hard and batted with a lot of men on base. He ran well, and, if a ball hit that hard was elevated, it might be a two-run homer. (Or more.) Rickey Henderson stole 130 the year he was caught 42 times. That's 76%, which is a good percentage in any era. Sure, they'd prefer he was caught fewer times, but I doubt they trade the 130 steals. The caught srtealing numbers are the cost of doing business.

1:45 PM Jun 11th

Gfletch
Fun article, Dave, a pleasure to read (as always).

It's a gift that some writers, even otherwise very good writers, don't have. You've either been blessed or else developed it. I imagine that it comes from a love of reading.

Anyway, I should stop with the compliments, already.??
1:15 PM Jun 11th

RipCity
Cards fan here -- Matt Carpenter is indeed an interesting player. He's changed so much over his career -- first, he was a line-drive spray hitter who commanded the strike zone and never struck out; then, overnight, he became a pull-hitting guy who would sell out enough that the k's started to creep up, but it was a worthwhile tradeoff; now, he's an aging bench bat who still scorches the ball when he can catch up, but hits it right into the shift and doesn't quite have the power anymore to hit it OVER the shift often enough to be a really good player. (His current spray charts are deceiving: while they say he still hits the ball the other way fairly often, when he does it's almost always a lazy fly ball; nearly all of his potential hits are pulled.) It's a polarizing profile for Cards fans, but one that, among other quirks, stays out of the double play. He just doesn't hit many weak / routine ground balls; the ones he does hit tend to be right at the 1B, and 3-6-1 or 3-6-3 are tougher to turn. More typical are worm-burners right into the shift, which are also hard to turn two on, for a different reason. Hitting leadoff for much of his career also may keep his DP numbers down...
12:16 AM Jun 11th

BobGill
Stevemaxon: No, a double play only creates one bad out. The first out is just a normal at-bat that failed; it's the second out, the extra out, that's the bad one. And since you might assume that the guys who hit into a lot of double plays (slower right-handed hitters) are not usually the same guys who get thrown out stealing, that should give this "stat" a reasonably fair balance.

3for3: I was going to say the same thing. It's too bad they haven't been counting outs on the basepaths since 1900; it would've been easy enough to do. And they would certainly qualify as bad outs.
11:03 PM Jun 10th

3for3
How about adding in outs on base? Not sure when they started keeping track of those.
7:45 PM Jun 10th

stevemaxon
The list is biased toward the fast and good because, as you note, only they can ring up high CS numbers. What if you'd doubled the weight for GIDPs? After all, the double play creates two bad outs.
4:23 PM Jun 10th

MWeddell
"Chad Curtis: let’s just leave it that there are names that make you wince when they show up on a table."

"Luis Polonia" also is a name that makes me wince. Kind of a similar player. A Yankee outfielder who didn't have great baseball instincts, who seemed to make bad baseball decisions. Too many caught stealing obviously, but I suspect that other aspects of defensive awareness and baserunning also weren't strengths for Polonia and Curtis.
3:49 PM Jun 10th

DaveFleming
That early sentence should read: "I sometimes think of double-plays and caught stealing as ‘twin’ events, though they aren't exactly parallel."

I'm a terrible editor. Sorry, all.
2:58 PM Jun 10th

bhalbleib
Haven't read the whole article yet, but in 1987 they had a rabbit ball for most of the year. Lots of people had career highs in HR. Wade Boggs pretty famously (23 vs. 11 in 2nd highest year).
2:54 PM Jun 10th

Bad Outs

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