Willie Wilson “Speed Kills”
In the Fall of 1980, just weeks after they were crowned World Series champions for the first time in their franchise’s history, The Phillies were back at it. Instead of red and white pinstripes, they wore tan blazers, spread collars and multiple cans of hairspray. Their shortstop, Larry Bowa, served as affable spokesman. Next to him was golden-gloved Gary Maddox, whose white suit contrasted perfectly with his black shirt and pocket square. Then came Schmitty — the MVP — whose hair was full and feathered and whose beard was trimmed within a millimeter of his face. Del Unser was next, looking like the Mario Brother who only came off the bench when Mario or Luigi were injured. And then, finally, was pitcher Dick Ruthven, who looked like Richie Cunningham on steroids. The Phillies appeared only half pretty, but they looked plenty ready.
Across the room stood five Royals from Kansas City. The AL pennant winners sent relief ace and quote machine Dan Quisenberry, looking like a chemistry class substitute teacher and playing the role of team spokesman. There was Paul Splitorff, who presented like a visually impaired physicist (he was neither), John Wathan, who looked like he’d unsuccessfully opened for Jerry Seinfield at “The Improv” (he’d not), and Dennis Leonard, who could have passed for Timothy Busfield’s in “Thirty Something.” That day, The Royals did not send their all world third baseman, George Brett. Instead they sent four total dorks. Fortunately, they also sent the coolest human being on the planet: Willie Wilson. In 1980, Wilson led the American League in at bats (705), hits (230), runs (133) and triples (15). He finished seventh in the league in batting average (.326), second in the league in stolen bases (79) and fourth in the MVP voting, while claiming both a Gold Glove and Silver Slugger award. And though he lacked the grace of Brett and the power of Schmidt, Willie Wilson had one thing over every other Major League Player: speed. Raw, unfathomable speed.
At six feet, three inches tall, baseball had never seen a speedster like Willie Wilson. Rickey Henderson was five foot ten. Tim Raines five eight. Joe Morgan five seven. Lou Brock five eleven. In the not so distant future, Vince Coleman would arrive and break the six foot ceiling. But never before had there been a leadoff hitter so fast and so imposing as Willie. And also, so goddamn cool. That Fall night in 1980, standing opposite the World Champs and alongside his K.C. geek squad, Wilson looked untouchable. On the bottom, he wore tan, tight fitted chinos. Up top, he sported a black Members Only jacket, slightly unzipped and exposing a tasteful gold chain but (seemingly) no shirt beneath. His hair, beard and mustache were shorn neatly, evoking a young Teddy Pendergrass. And, most importantly, he kept a lollipop in his mouth at all times. Willie Wilson was ready to play The Feud!
Yep — late in 1980, having just lost the Fall Classic in six, The Royals faced off against The Phillies on The Family Feud. Game one went to Philly, with Bowa, Unser and Maddox scoring big hits. But in game two Willie Wilson was not fucking around. Aggressively terse and unwilling to part with his lollipop, Wilson dominated the show, rattling The Phils and the usually unflappable, if slurry, host, Richard Dawson. But even Dawson had to marvel at The Royals’ leadoff man, who started the game two for two, scoring successful answers to the question: “Name something people usually have less of when they get older.” Neither of Wilson’s answers — ”sex” and “teeth” — were number one. Neither scored triple digits. But both landed squarely on the board. Just as he was on the diamond, Wilson was a spark of lightning for K.C., who went on to dominate the game and win twenty thousand dollars for a local arthritis charity.
While it wasn’t his breakout season (that would have been the year before), 1980 was Wilson’s greatest single season in baseball. And yet, it was undoubtedly not his greatest season in organized sports. That would have been either 1972 or 1973 when, at Summit High School, Wilson rushed for a combined 3,700 yards and returned eleven of twenty four interceptions for touchdowns. In the one hundred plus years of Summit High School football, the team has four undefeated seasons. Two of them came while Wilson was there, including a state championship in 1973. In the spring of those years, Wilson also hit .444 and .436. But football is where he most shined. To this day, the school’s record for most career point, most rushing yards in a game, longest rush and longest interception return are all Wilson’s. To watch grainy highlight footage of Wilson from that period is to see the first coming of Deion Sanders if Deion was also Bo Jackson.
And yet, the greatest all-around football player in the history of New Jersey high school football chose baseball. He chose baseball for very rational reasons — it was a more lucrative and less dangerous sport. But Willie also chose baseball because he excelled at it. Willie could hit, he could field and he could run. In fact, he ran so fast that he could catch balls no one else could get to. So fast that he could turn groundouts into singles, singles into doubles and doubles into triples. Wilson led the league in singles every year from 1979 through 1982, led the league in triples five times and was top five in stolen bases eleven times. Defensively, he was just as great, leading the league in Zone Runs multiple times and accruing the highest career range factor of any left fielder in the history of the sport and the eleventh highest of any center fielder. He never hit like George Brett. He never walked like Darrell Porter. He couldn’t throw like Amos Otis. But Willie Wilson did everything else just as well or better than anyone to ever play the game.
If he’s remembered at all, Wilson is generally remembered for a few eyebrow raising stats. The fact that he has more triples than any player since 1950 with the exception of Roberto Clemente. The fact that thirteen of his forty-one career home runs were inside the park home runs. But Wilson is also often recalled as a cautionary tale about cocaine in Major League Baseball. In late 1983, along with teammates Willie Aikens, Jerry Martin and Vida Blue, he was sentenced to three months in prison for attempting to purchase cocaine. His one year suspension from the game was reduced to thirty games and, though he managed to hit .301 for the balance of 1984, Willie Wilson was never quite the same again. Between 1979 and 1984, Wilson was a .300 hitter, good for fifty plus steals per year. After his arrest, for the rest of his career, he was more like a .260 and forty steals guy. He was always a threat to lead the league in triples, but he almost never walked. And so, by the late eighties he was ostensibly an extra glove, platoon leadoff guy and pinch runner. Even then, before the era of advanced analytics, teams increasingly realized that zero home runs, a smattering of triples and a .300 on base percentage was not the Willie Wilson they’d hoped for.
Nineteen years after it began, the strange case of Willie Wilson’s Major League career came to an end. As a Chicago Cub in 1994, over the course of seventeen games and twenty-one at bats, Wilson managed five hits, no doubles, no home runs, one walk and — predictably — two triples. With more than twenty-two hundred hits, nearly seven hundred steals and one batting title on his resume, he had an exceptional, but far from Hall of Fame caliber career. At the same time, his undeniable greatness remains obscured by questions about what could have been and, moreover, what actually was.
As for the former — “what could have been” — the answers are obviously complicated. Could Wilson have been an elite college and professional football player? Short of injury, there’s simply no reason to suggest otherwise — he was that skilled, that fast and that much better than his competition on both sides of the field. Would he have been Deion Sanders plus Bo Jackson? Of course not. But also, even half of that, even on one side of the field, would have been something to behold. And as for his baseball career, what could have been if Wilson had steered clear of cocaine? What if, instead of starting to switch hit the year after his MLB debut, he’d started years earlier? And, maybe most of all, what if he’d figured out how to take a walk? In some parallel universe, was Willie Wilson a game ruining leadoff man? Was he a faster Rod Carew? Was he a higher percentage Rickey Henderson? Was he the greatest of all time?
All of these hypotheticals presume that, in some way, Wilson’s career was underwhelming. Or that it was a betrayal of talent. That cocaine hampered his progress. That hubris stunted his evolution. That a lesser talent would have, out of necessity, scratched and clawed more. And I suppose that all of those things could be true. But I would more so suggest that the actual premise is flawed. That not only did Wilson actually have an extraordinary career — his forty-six WAR are more than several Hall of Famers, he won two pennants and one World Series title and he was a historically great outfielder — but that by many standards, Willie Wilson was the single greatest baserunner of all time.
Whereas batting and pitching statistics are relatively well understood — OPS or OPS+ for hitters and, WHIP, ERA or Zone Contact Percentage for hurlers — fielding and especially baserunning statistics are much less so. For instance, it’s hard to compare great runners who get on base a lot (Rickey Henderson, Tim Raines) with those, like Willie Wilson, who get on base less frequently. Willie Wilson’s career average was higher than Rickey’s (.285 vs .279) but not quite so high as Raines’ (.294). The key difference between the three, however, is that Rickey walked a ton, Raines quite a bit and Wilson barely ever. As a result, in comparing three of the four (along with Vince Coleman) greatest baserunners of their era, you are comparing two men who got were base all of the time — one of whom had exceptional power (Henderson), one of whom had solid power (Raines) — with a player who was on base less frequently and who possessed very little (home run) power. It’s like comparing apples to pineapples.
On an absolute basis, Wilson does not rise to the level of the more prolific leadoff men of his era. But on a percentage basis, things are get more complicated, and more interesting. Wilson’s career stolen base percentage (83.3%) is second only to Raines for players with four hundred plus steals. Over the course of his career, when he got on base, Wilson had a forty-three percent chance of scoring. By comparison, Rickey Henderson was forty. In 1979 Willie’s RSP was fifty percent. Stat after stat confirms that, while he was mediocre at getting on base, and dreadful at hitting home runs, Willie Wilson was incredible at getting from first to second, from second to third and from third to home. This extreme talent is relatively easy to measure but much harder to correlate to wins and losses.
Willie Wilson was mot merely exceptional at getting (taking) extra bases, he was extraordinary at scoring runs. Since 1946, only two players have scored one hundred and twenty five or more runs, excluding their own home runs. Wilson was one, Chuck Knoblauch was the other. Moreover, his career Rbaser — functionally the all in one stat measuring a players net value across average all baserunning events (stolen bases, caught stealing, extra bases taken, extra bases given up, etc.) — is second all time (to Rickey Henderson). But even that stat is still misleading in that it is cumulative. If you look at Rbaser on a per one hundred times on basis, Wilson is head and shoulders above the competition.
It is a cliche to suggest that, in life, your greatest blessing becomes your curse — that your feature becomes your bug. But in the case of Willie Wilson that seems especially true. So gifted, so fast and so strong, Willie could have been an All Star in most any sport. But the sport he chose was the one which least suited his particular genius. Willie was very good at putting the bat on the ball. But he was below average at getting on base and abysmal at hitting the ball long distances. On the other hand, he was otherworldly at chasing down fly balls, advancing bases on his own and scoring runs without hitting home runs. There’s a certain tragedy in knowing that you can surely do things that no one else in the game can do — for example, that you can run a hundred yards in less than nine and a half seconds — but at the same time knowing that those things only matter so much in your chosen game. And there’s a certain masochism in willfully avoiding walks, while also knowing that if you were just a wee bit more discerning, you’d undoubtedly steal dozens more bases. That, statistically speaking, you’d score one half run for each of those incremental base on balls. And there’s a hard to explain obstinance in knowing that if you adjusted your swing ever so slightly, you’d undoubtedly hit double digit home runs.
After all, you’re a six foot three inch halfback and cornerback in a slap hitters body. You are right and they’re wrong. The game is wrong. The math is wrong. Rickey and Rock and Brett and Schmitty are wrong. Just look at you — in that Members Only jacket, lollipop in mouth, faster and cooler than the other guys. Who needs walks and home runs? You’re gonna make WAR your way. I mean — consider Juan Pierre, whose career stats are almost identical to Wilson’s but whose career WAR is roughly a third of the Family Feud royal. Why is that the case? Because Pierre couldn’t catch like Willie. And, fast as he was, he couldn’t run like Willie. Willie Wilson was the greatest of all time at the parts of baseball that we kind of understand and can only barely measure.