Stealing Home

More on Jackie Robinson in the 1955 World Series

Stealing Home

Imagine my delight when I came across this headline on the front page of an old issue of The Boston Globe:

From The Boston Sunday Globe, October 2, 1955, page 1

If nothing else, this is proof that “clickbait” is not something that was invented recently.

And the brief interview with Jackie Robinson that follows is even better:

From The Boston Sunday Globe, October 2, 1955, page 1

George Moriarty is actually an interesting player. The BR Bullpen will tell you that he was only documented to have stolen home 11 times, but that rumor had it that he would steal home anytime he was on third base.

I’m not sure what the documentation is based on, and presume that there’s some article out there that I haven’t read yet. I was able to find a time when Moriarty was caught stealing home in 1908, though:

From The New York Evening World, April 23, 1908, page 1

And then there was this example of him stealing home later in that season:

From The Sun (New York), August 20, 1908, page 6

But, as usual, I need to do more research to figure stuff like this out.

Thanks to this excellent Bill Nowlin article, we do know how often Jackie Robinson stole home in his career. Jackie stole home 19 times in the regular season in his career, and was caught stealing home 12 times.

On August 28, 1955, Jackie was caught trying to steal home for the first time in over 14 months:

From New York Daily News, August 29, 1955, page 72

And it seems that Jackie felt that he could make it because of the momentum he had generated with some pretty aggressive baserunning:

From New York Daily News, August 29, 1955, page 69

Robinson, of course, was not one to be deterred. He went for it again on August 29:

From St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 30, 1955, page 4C

What you won’t see if you only look at the boxscore is that Jackie was nursing sore legs at the time:

From Claremore Progress (Claremore, Oklahoma), August 30, 1955, page 3 - note that this was back when baseball was big news all over the country.

And then there was the minor issue of Billy Martin being thrown out in the same World Series game that Jackie was famously called safe:

From The Boston Sunday Globe, October 2, 1955, page 77

So why did Jackie go for it with the odds against him? It’s simple. He figured the Yankees weren’t expecting it:

From The Boston Sunday Globe, October 2, 1955, page 77

Perhaps there was the element of surprise. Perhaps Robinson saw the pitcher do something that we can’t see in the television broadcast or in the game film.

Or perhaps Robinson was actually out. We’ll never know.

Note that the original article is too long for me to reproduce here. If you want to read the full article, check out my Patreon page.