“It took me 17 years to get 3,000 hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.” — Henry Aaron
The notion that speed matters only so much is a well-known truism in baseball. And yet, every time baseball people catch a glimpse of human beings running at an exceptionally quick pace, it once again becomes the drug they can’t quit.
The Kansas City Royals reintroduced speed to a national baseball audience last fall. It was hard not to swoon over the sight of road runners Jarrod Dyson and Terrance Gore tearing up the base paths…except when you remember that the impact of Dyson and Gore’s speed on the base paths was relatively minimal in a statistical sense.