Steal this base.(why base stealing needs to become a tool in baseball)

One of baseball's best weapons is ripe for a comeback, says the first man to swipe 100 bags in a season

To me, the stolen base is a fantastic offensive weapon that seems to have gone by the wayside. I don't think there is any secret why: because of the long ball. It's Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa making the home run so popular. If you are a manager now, you are playing for the big inning, not for a run here or a run there. You've got a livelier ball, so the fashionable thing is to go for the home run.

But the stolen base still can be a weapon.

The stolen base--baserunning in general--is the only part of the game that does not go into slumps. Think about it: Hitting has slumps. Pitching and fielding have slumps. Baserunning always will be there for you. Once you know baserunning, once you really understand it, you can rely on it. I feel that most one-run ball games are won or lost because of outstanding baserunning or boneheaded baserunning. Somewhere between the first and last inning of a tight game, a baserunning play is going to decide it.

Baserunning is down now, but if you look at baseball, the history and trends, you see that every so often, every X amount of years, someone comes along and changes the game. I did that in the early '60s. If you look at that time, the game was much the same as it is now--a lot of sluggers, a lot of home runs. The stolen base was not a big thing. My first year leading the league was in 1960, and the year before that, Willie Mays led the league in steals with 27 stolen bases. Now it has gone back to that way.

You have to understand, there was a reason for the change. In the 1950s there were a lot of small parks. In the '60s. the new, larger parks started coming in. It happened in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. The old parks had short fences, so it was easy to hit home runs. The Dodgers moved to Dodger Stadium in 1962, and we went from a field that was 250 feet down the line to one that was 330 feet. So we had to change our thinking. The Dodgers wanted to use speed. It's not a coincidence that in 1961 I stole 35 bases, then in 1962, in the new stadium, I stole 104. We stole twice as many bases in 1962 as the next team on the list. We made the game into a speed game.

Of course, now stadiums have gone the other way. They're smaller now. It's easier to hit home runs. Guys are afraid to go for stolen bases. It's easier to wait on home runs.