Quote Originally Posted by Commercecomet24 View Post
My HS coach was good friends with Whitey, they knew each other from the minors and Whitey used to come visit with us every January when we're getting ready for the season. He told me one time, when in doubt, run!, lol! I loved the guy and he's the one I patterned my aggressive baserunning in coaching. He always took time to answer our questions from a bunch of dumb teenagers. RIP to the White Rat! The running game is so much fun for the players and the fans, it keeps everyone on their toes and keeps defenses and pitchers unsettled. I guarantee if someone brought back Whitey Balll other teams wouldn't know what to do! Pitchers don't know how to hold runners anymore and that 3 time throw over thing would get em in trouble too. I would love to see someone bring that style back.
I loved Whitey's style with those Royals and Cardinals teams. My Dad did too. When my Dad was our rec coach at age 11-12, we got stuck with the "leftovers" at the park. We didn't have great players - but somehow we had a bunch of kids who could run. Dad decided since that's all we could do, we were going to create chaos. We spent a third of our practices running bases. He had most of the team running on the first pitch every time we got on base - stealing second and third. We would take huge leads off third, and bait the catcher into throwing back to third thinking he had an easy pick - then pivot and run home. It worked about 75% of the time. There were two or three of us he would have steal home straight up. Pitchers at that age had no clue what to do when they saw us streaking toward home in the middle of their wind up. They either stopped their motion and balked, or hit the backstop trying to hurry the throw home. We didn't win a lot of games - but we had a ton of fun and pissed off a bunch of coaches.