number of homeruns stolen?

[yellan]

Hello, all - I'm a frequent TwinsDaily reader but I don't believe I've posted in the forums before.  A question has occurred to me, and I can't seem to find the answer anywhere in the forums or elsewhere online.  If the answer exists, I suspect the readers here can point me in the right direction.  

Kirby Puckett is known leaping above the outfield fence to steal homeruns.  Is there a tally of the homeruns he stole - either by year, or over the course of his career?  Is there a tally of other players (I'm mostly concerned with Twins, but I'm curious about other teams as well).  My assumption is that Puckett is the Twins all time leader in homeruns stolen, but maybe Torii Hunter has him beat?  

Any ideas as to whether this has been compiled?  

Edited March 7, 2022 by yellan
poor capitalization

[Brock Beauchamp]

Welcome to the board! I have no answer for your question but I'm also curious if anyone has ever done a study of this...

[Musk21]

Welcome! I thought your question was an interesting one as well and tried to do some digging. Unfortunately, the only info that I could find on this subject was from an April 2018 article on The Athletic.  It was written by someone by the name of Mark Simon from Sports Info Solutions. They did a study on the number of home runs robbed from 2004 - 2017 (15 seasons), so Puckett is obviously not included and only a portion of Torii Hunter's career is included. The top 5 players with "Home Run Robberies" during that time were:

1) Carlos Gomez - 13

2) Torii Hunter - 12

3t) Mike Trout - 10

Ichiro - 10

Adam Jones - 10

https://theathletic.com/300720/2018/04/05/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-home-run-robberies-as-tracked-by-sports-info-solutions/

[Brock Beauchamp]

Wait, I know the answer to this. It's not scientific but it's almost certainly true.

The Twins all-time homerun thief is almost surely Torii Hunter.

Why? Because Puckett played almost his entire career with 10' high plexiglass surrounding the outfield wall of the Metrodome.

I bet you all forgot about that damned plexiglass, didn't you?

[cHawk]

Welcome to TD! @yellan

I’m not sure how you would find this. Normally I would say a baseball savant search is the way to go but my method would require watching video of all of the plays that come up in the search.

[wsnydes]

20 minutes ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

 

I bet you all forgot about that damned plexiglass, didn't you?

Not at all, but I definitely wish I could!

[Musk21]

Here's another article from Sports Info Solutions from May 10, 2019 that updated their info from that April 2018 Athletic piece I posted:

https://www.sportsinfosolutions.com/2019/05/10/home-run-robberies-are-up-at-least-recently/

Home Run Robberies (from 2004 - May 9th, 2019)

Carlos Gomez - 13

Torii Hunter - 12

Adam Jones - 11

Mike Trout - 11

Ichiro Suzuki - 10

[yellan]

Musk21, thanks for the article - this is easily the best compilation of such data that I've seen.  It's also so recent that it doesn't even confirm Torii's numbers in full.  

Brock, while it's entirely in the realm of possibility that Torii has stolen more home runs than any other Twin in history, the plexiglass only stretched to deep left center.  That surely cut down the opportunities, but it's at best a third of the fence line.  If Dan Gladden was the thief in question, we'd be talking about a greater impact.  Anecdotally, all the Puckett leaps I recall (other than the '91 Series) came right in front of the 408 numbers.  

cHawk, I'm not familiar with baseballsavant - when I tried to search, I couldn't find much beyond the statcast era.  

The one option that I'm seeing is a review of Retrosheet play-by-play descriptions game by game.  That's a tall task.