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It’s a hidden shame among baseball writers with any kind of national focus that we can’t watch every minute of every game. At 7 p.m. Eastern I usually put on MLB.tv and watch the first few innings of the best East Coast pitching matchup, with one of the two teams I get on cable (Astros or Rangers) in the background, until one of those games gets boring, at which point I hop around to whichever game is on and closest.

As a result, I didn’t watch an enormous amount of Seattle Mariners action in late 2015, by which point they were already out of contention. So I was shocked, on one occasion upon which I saw this phenomenon live, to discover that Lloyd McClendon, then the manager of the Seattle Mariners, had called upon Logan Morrison as a pinch-runner, in a game in which he had an expanded roster to draw from.

“Why,” cried I into the maw of late-night Twitter, with the desperation of a man adrift at sea and forsaken by God, “is Lloyd McClendon using Logan Morrison as a pinch-runner?”

It was only then that Meg Rowley—who’s a real-life Mariners fan, bless her heart—informed me that Morrison had been used in this befuddling manner before.

I went to Baseball-Reference, and sure enough: Logan Morrison made six appearances as a pinch-runner in the final two months of the 2015 season.

For those of you not familiar with Logan Morrison, he is a 6-foot-2, 240-pound first base/DH type whose first name is actually Justis, to which the moral arc of the universe is said to bend nearly as slowly as Morrison runs the bases. He is a large, sturdy man who was designed to move only enough to keep him from collapsing during an earthquake. It is hilarious that he’d be used as a pinch-runner in anything but an empty-the-bench situation during a blowout.

Except Morrison pinch-ran in one-run games three times, once each for Mark Trumbo, Robinson Cano and Jesus Montero, none of whom is significantly faster, except Cano, who was battling abdominal pain in the second half of the year.

Logan Morrison maybe not being the slowest person on the Mariners is one of those things that it’s possible to know intellectually even while it feels viscerally wrong.

And because this is baseball, using a player like Morrison as a pinch-runner probably isn’t even unprecedented.

According to Baseball-Reference, there are 17 active position players who weigh as much as or more than Morrison, and who have carried that bulk around the bases enough to have a worse mark than his -4.3 career baserunning runs. The full list is here, though it can be pruned somewhat for reasons of subjective hilarity.

Yasiel Puig, for instance, is both larger and, perhaps because of his aggressiveness, a worse statistical baserunner than Morrison. Just like a bear. At the risk of mixing animal metaphors, we don’t want thoroughbreds here—we want bears.

Anthony Rizzo stole 17 bases last year, while Juan Uribe, Delmon Young and Miguel Cabrera run afoul of Bender’s First Law of Corpulence (familiar to anyone who’s seen The Breakfast Club): “There are two kinds of fat people: there's fat people that were born to be fat, and there's fat people that were once thin but became fat… so when you look at 'em you can sorta see that thin person inside.”

That leaves:

Player

Rbaser

Wt (Ilbs.)

Jose Abreu

-4.5

255

Matt Adams

-4.8

260

Chris Carter

-4.8

250

Tyler Flowers

-5.8

245

Salvador Perez

-5.8

240

Pablo Sandoval

-7.6

255

Lucas Duda

-8.9

255

Mike Morse

-9.6

245

Brayan Pena

-12.8

240

Billy Butler

-27.4

240

Ryan Howard

-27.7

250

Prince Fielder

-35.9

275

Have any of these men been used as pinch-runners? Let’s go down the list.

No to Jose Abreu or Matt Adams. Likewise no to Chris Carter, which you don’t need Play Index to figure out—you can tell because of the lack of structural damage to Fruit Juice Field in Houston.

Yes, however, to Tyler Flowers.

Flowers is an interesting case, because most of the time, if you’re going to play in the big leagues at 245 pounds, at least as a position player, you’re going to be there because of your bat—you’ll notice a glut, so to speak, of first basemen on this list. Pinch-running is, in essence, the act of taking a task meant for one person—circling the bases—and dividing its components between two people. Everyone on this list is better, relatively speaking, at getting from home to first than from first all the way back around to home again.

Except Flowers, who, with two of his best seasons in 2014 and 2015, white-knuckled his career TAv all the way up to .237. He is, in short, not a very good hitter.

However, on Aug. 23, 2014, he pinch-ran in the ninth inning of a 5-3 loss to the Yankees. Paul Konerko pinch-hit for Adrian Nieto, walked, and Flowers ran for him. And even this makes sense. Flowers is surely slow, but not slower than a 38-year-old Konerko. Because Flowers represented only cutting the deficit in half, rather than tying the game or winning it, White Sox manager Robin Ventura could be forgiven for holding back a faster runner for later use, particularly because, by having pinch-hit for his catcher, he ensured that he’d have to use Flowers at some point if the White Sox had tied the game.

This move is therefore defensible for the same reason McClendon using Morrison like Esix Snead is defensible: There’s always a slower runner.

Back to the list. No to Salvador Perez, and no to Pablo Sandoval, which is disappointing if only because it means there’s no video of him pinch-running. No to Lucas Duda.

Mike Morse never pinch-ran in San Francisco, which he saved from the MUTO in a 2014 Gareth Edwards film. He did, however, pinch-run twice before that: once on Aug. 23, 2010, in relief of Adam Dunn, while the Nationals were down nine runs, and once on Aug. 29, 2005, which features a turn of events that would be inconceivable today.

Morse pinch-ran for Willie Bloomquist and stayed in the game to play shortstop—and not only to play shortstop but to move Yuniesky Betancourt over to second base. The reason for this, and why the incident is not mentioned in the AP game recap, is that Morse played 55 games at shortstop for the Mariners as a rookie, and so Bender’s first law of corpulence strikes again. Though even in 2005, a Morse/Betancourt shortstop pairing goes a long way toward explaining how the Mariners lost 93 games that year.

Brayan Pena has pinch-run five times in his career, twice for Jose Guillen in typical empty-your-bench moments—a 12-inning game and a 12-run loss—and three times in the kind of substitute-a-slightly-less-slow-catcher situation that got Flowers in that game in 2014. Once in 2013, Pena came in to caddy for Alex Avila, and twice he ran for Brian McCann, once on Sept. 30, 2006, and once on April 8, 2007, in a classic pinch-running situation: With the Braves down a run in the top of the ninth, McCann doubled Chipper Jones in to tie it, at which point Bobby Cox removed McCann and inserted Pena, who came around to score the winning run on a Jeff Francoeur double. So it sort of worked.

Billy Butler has never pinch-run in the major leagues, because what I was saying earlier about there always being a slower runner does not apply to Billy Butler. Nor has Prince Fielder.

But Ryan Howard has, just once, on Aug. 5, 2011.

The goal here was to see if there was anything weirder in recent pinch-running history than Logan Morrison pinch-running six times in two months, and while there were extenuating circumstances, it is the absolute truth that Ryan Howard once ran for Shane Victorino in a major-league ballgame.

Now, remember, this is pre-Achilles surgery Ryan Howard, who could run a little but took a long time to get up to speed. You know, like an ocean liner.

Even so, he was at no point faster than Shane Victorino. But Victorino, when Howard entered the game, was unavailable.

There was about a year and a half where the Phillies and Giants cleared the benches every time they played each other, dating to the 2010 NLCS, where Roy Halladay almost fought Pat Burrell in Game 5 and Chase Utley almost fought Jonathan Sanchez in Game 6. This was probably the nastiest of the fights that followed, and it is solely responsible for the bizarre anti-Eli Whiteside animus that still persists in certain corners of the Delaware Valley.

Essentially, Ramon Ramirez hit Victorino in the back with a ball, because 1) the Giants were down six runs 2) the Phillies and Giants hadn’t fought yet that night and 3) this was a point in time where pretty much everyone in baseball wanted to hit Victorino all the time. Ramirez got tossed for hitting Victorino, and Victorino got tossed because, while he probably meant to go to first base eventually, he took a long route to the bag that would’ve allowed him to beat up Ramirez if he hadn’t been intercepted by Whiteside and home plate umpire Mike Muchlinski.

Howard had had the night off against Sanchez, then a tough lefty. John Mayberry, the Phillies’ backup center fielder at the time, had started at first base, and rather than insert a pinch-runner, then bring in Howard for the bottom of the inning, Phillies manager Charlie Manuel simply cut out the extra step. Besides, up six runs and having just come off a particularly brutal fight, speed is probably a less desirable quality in a baserunner than the ability to keep tempers from flaring again, and Howard is not only very serene but very large.

So there are scenarios—a blowout, replacing a catcher, bringing an end to violence—in which you’d want to pinch-run with a very large, very slow man. But if you’re doing it six times in two months, in the normal run of play, it’s probably a good time to get some faster bench players.

Thank you for reading

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bhacking
2/10
No problem, Seattle fixed this problem by adding Adam Lind :-)
smitty99
2/11
Morse came up as a SS. He was skinny back then.
jfranco77
2/12
There's probably a legitimate warning in here about not having all your non starting CF outfielders be slow. Ackley, Gutierrez, Seth Smith, Nelson Cruz, Trumbo, LoMo.... yeah. But where was James Jones during all this? Was he just not on the roster at the time?