Next month kicks off the minor league pro basketball NCAA March Madness Tournament. I am admittedly ignorant of most basketball names outside of my years growing up in which a hoop was anchored near a fence in my backyard. College basketball is one where I know even fewer names. If asked to name three NCAA players who played in the past five years, I can quickly give you Caitlin Clark, try to squeeze through that five year window with Zion Williamson, and return a blank stare for the third name. It’s a fault, I know.
With the opening tip off just weeks away, the one tournament name that always comes to my mind is…5’10” Kenny Lofton. The starting center fielder of the Hall of Very Good made it all the way to the Final Four as the sixth man for the University of Arizona Wildcats.
At the end of 1991 Lofton’s MLB career consisted only of 20 games, a pair of stolen bases, and a .203 batting average. Score thought enough of the young outfielder to issue multiple cards of him in the debut of the firm’s premium Pinnacle brand. He shows up on four different cards, two of which are inserts with the balance arriving as part of different series within the base set. The first series Lofton depicts him as a baseball player, but only on the back of the card.
The card front shows him scoring on the court for the Wild Cats and is part of a 14-card subset focused on players’ extracurricular activities. Highlighting Score’s expectations for Lofton was the fact that these “Sidelines” cards were almost completely allocated among some of the better players in the game. Nolan Ryan is shown on horseback, Robin Yount is racing dirt bikes, and Tom Glavine is playing hockey. Collectors could also catch Kirby Puckett playing pool, Randy Johnson setting up his camera, and Orel Hershiser working on his golf swing. I suspect a rookie was included for both the American (Lofton) and National Leagues (John Wetteland) and these may have reflected some sort of internal Rookie of the Year prediction within the card manufacturer’s office.
Lofton almost made that view look prescient. He finished second in ROY voting behind…checks notes…Pat Listach. Both were base stealing stars in 1992 (Listach with 54 against Lofton’s 66) and its difficult three decades later to envision how Lofton could have finished second in the race for the award.
After all, an outfielder who can perform a two hand backwards dunk is probably pretty good at taking some home runs away from opposing batters.
I played a lot of HORSE around that backyard basketball hoop, probably topping out in hours played around the time Lofton was making that catch in 1996. I was also busy sorting my baseball cards into 9-pocket “teams” in which I tried to assemble the best lineups possible. Rather than try and weight each skill individually, I tried to make different pages prioritize different types of players.
Sometimes this resulted in using made-up metrics. An example of the spirit of these teams would be one made up entirely of players who excelled at stealing bases. Rather than simply rank players by who had the most steals, stolen base totals were first adjusted for base running effectiveness. Because it takes roughly three successful stolen bases to offset a single time being caught stealing, total stolen bases were reduced by 3x the number of times a player was caught stealing. Let’s call this “net stolen bases.”
If building such a 9-player team from the ’93 Finest checklist, what would the optimal lineup look like in terms of net stolen bases?
| POSITION | NAME | SB | CS | NET STOLEN BASES |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OF | Rickey Henderson | 1,406 | 335 | 401 |
| OF | Tim Raines | 807 | 146 | 369 |
| OF | Eric Davis | 349 | 66 | 151 |
| SS | Barry Larkin | 379 | 77 | 148 |
| 2B | Roberto Alomar | 474 | 114 | 132 |
| 3B | Paul Molitor | 504 | 131 | 111 |
| C | Darren Daulton | 50 | 10 | 20 |
| 1B | Gregg Jefferies | 196 | 63 | 7 |
| P | Greg Maddux | 11 | 3 | 2 |
Lofton barely misses the positional cutoff for the outfield. He ranks fifth overall in the checklist in terms of net stolen bases (+142), so we could bat him without any reservations as a designated hitter instead of the pitcher. Given the steep drop in net stolen base production, it is apparent that he was in some pretty rare company. Even more amazing is the list of well known baserunners that he “lapped” by posting a greater net positive stolen base total compared to their net negative SB marks.
| NAME | SB | CS | NET SB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kenny Lofton | 622 | 160 | +142 |
| Ozzie Guillen | 169 | 108 | -155 |
| Harold Reynolds | 250 | 138 | -164 |
| Tony Fernandez | 246 | 138 | -165 |
| Brett Butler | 558 | 257 | -213 |
Setting Lofton’s runner-up finish in rookie of the year voting aside, Topps was still eager to include him as part of the abbreviated 199-card checklist of ’93 Finest. While the set is typically described as being focused on veteran players and omitting rookies, it should be noted that whoever was calling the checklist shots wanted a good amount of young talent to be represented. To that end, each of the top 8 vote recipients in 1992 ROY voting received cards.
