A few days ago, I wondered who was the slowest player of all time. I was looking at Daniel Vogelbach’s baseball-reference page, and I realized that in 4 years playing he had not stolen a base. He hadn’t even attempted to steal.
So I know that SB isn’t the best measure of whether a player is fast, but Statcast/Fangraphs metrics didn’t exist back before 2010. Therefore, there is no way to tell if a player was fast by foot/second back in the day.
Since 2015, Albert Pujols has been the slowest player by sprint speed. In 2020, it was Brian McCann with 22.2 feet per second. Remember, this is sprint speed.
According to the most PA without SB, Eric Hosmer was the slowest player in the game, although he was faster than 19% of the MLB according to sprint speed.
But who’s the slowest player of all time? If you look at most PA without a SB, it’s Russ Nixon. He had 2715 PA without a SB.
But then I realized that I was being silly, on a double steal when a runner is running to second, they just advanced for free. So I looked on baseball-reference to see who had the most career PA with less than 5 SB. It turned out to be…
Justin Morneau.
He was the slowest player of all time. The SLPOAT.