You can use this as a trivia question, if you like. There are 51 players in MLB history to record at least 150 career triples. Only 1 of those players never reached double digits in stolen bases for a year. He is Stan Musial.Musial finished his career with 177 triples. Twice he had 20 in a season and once he had 18. He also had 725 lifetime doubles, good for third place in MLB history. The following is from an early edition of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract:
"The image of Musial seems to be fading quickly. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to me that you hear much about him anymore, compared to such comparable stars as Mantle, Williams, Mays and DiMaggio, and to the extent that you do hear of him it doesn't seem that the image is very sharp, that anybody really knows what it was that made him different. He was never colorful, never much of an interview. He makes a better statue.
"What he was was a ballplayer. He didn't spit at fans, he didn't get into fights in nightclubs, he didn't marry anybody famous. He hustled. You look at his career totals of doubles and triples, and they'll remind you of something that was accepted while he was active, and has been largely forgotten since: Stan Musial was one player who always left the batter's box on a dead run.
"Musial's performance in MVP voting is the most impressive in the history of the award. Musial won three awards; so did Mantle, Berra, Campabella and DiMaggio. But Musial also finished second in the voting four times, meaning that he had seven years in which he was regarded by on-the-scenes observers as one of the two best players in the league."
It should be noted Musial also had a fourth, fifth, sixth, 2 eighths, and a ninth in the voting. Musial won his first MVP at the age of 22 when he batted .357/.425/.562 in 617 AB. At the age of 41, Musial finished 10th in the MVP voting after batting .330/.416/.508 in 433 AB.
The Man, indeed.
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