Stealing Runs Is No Small Feat

Ninety feet to cover. Three seconds to pull it off. Zero margin for error. And a chance to get whacked in the head with a baseball bat.

Stealing home is not for the faint of heart.

The Red Sox' Jacoby Ellsbury, who executed the rarest of thefts on the diamond to tack on an insurance run in Boston's 4-1 win over New York Sunday night, recognized as much.

"The biggest thing is getting the courage," Ellsbury told reporters after the game. "In that situation, bases loaded, you've got to make it."

Ellsbury certainly has the wheels to put a run on the board the hard way. He's swiped 69 bases in 82 tries in 196 big-league games, and is rumored to have run the 40-yard dash in a blistering 4.2 seconds.

But man cannot steal on speed alone. It took Mickey Mantle 3.1 seconds to go from home to first base in the fastest time on record. A runner leading off third doesn't have quite as far to go—Ellsbury wandered perhaps 15 feet off the bag before taking off—but also loses a step to slide under the tag.

Add it all up, and even a track star needs between two-and-a-half and three seconds to go from third to home.

That's still forever and a day compared to the half-second it takes for a modest 80-mile-per-hour throw to get from the mound to the catcher's mitt. Even with time factored in for the wind-up and the tag, trying to outrun the ball is a fool's errand. If you break for the plate after the ball is thrown, you're too late.

Instead, stealing home means seizing moments of opportunity within a pitcher's rhythm. Ellsbury decided to try his luck Sunday after watching Yankees starter Andy Pettite plod through the wind-up on an earlier pitch to J.D. Drew.

Ellsbury was aided by a dramatic infield shift employed against Drew. New York third baseman Angel Berroa, playing all the way over at shortstop, made no effort to hold the runner close to the base.

By the time Pettite reached the point where he could not stop his motion without incurring a balk, Ellsbury was halfway home. By the time Pettite released the pitch, Ellsbury was even with the on-deck circle.

Ellsbury wasn't the first to notice Pettite's deliberate cadence: In May 2007, Toronto's Aaron Hill took advantage of a long lull between pitches to swipe home from Pettite himself. Pettite admitted after the Ellsbury steal that he should have been throwing from the stretch, but even that didn't help him nail Hill.

A left-handed pitcher is a must in stealing home, since lefties need to look over their shoulders to see third and turn away from their natural pitching stances to throw to the bag. A right-handed better helps the runner in that he blocks the catcher's view down the line, but a lefty at the plate is more likely to see the steal coming and lay off his swing.

Drew did just that, and Ellsbury was grateful: "I was just hoping J.D. wasn't going to swing at a pitch right down the middle and hit me," he confessed after the fact.

Or, as Rod Carew, who pilfered the plate 17 times in his career, put it, "I could have gotten killed if the batter had swung."

Beyond the proper match-up and circumstances, baserunners have employed a variety of signature strategies in accomplishing the feat over the years.

Ty Cobb, baseball's all-time leader with 54 steals of home, sharpened his cleats to make catchers think twice about getting in his way.

Jackie Robinson, who swiped the plate 19 times in his career, used a sweeping hook slide to avoid tags. Carew took advantage of his reputation as a limited baserunning threat (he topped 30 stolen bases in just four of his 19 seasons) to sneak out to big leads and take off without warning.

There's a reason the Baseball Almanac lists just 38 players with 10 or more career steals of home, a healty portion of whom preceded the live-ball era (MLB doesn't track the event as an official statistic): No matter how fast or how tricky a runner is, the act takes a lot of luck.

Indeed, even with an enormous jump, Ellsbury was safe just inches ahead of Jorge Posada's tag.

Those who caught Ellsbury's steal as it happened should consider themselves lucky. The line in the play-by-play—"J. Ellsbury steals home"—is just about as understated as they come, and even the replay lacks the "will he or won't he?" drama of the real thing.

Fans might not see anything like it again: If a you're a team looking to plate a man from third, there are easier ways to do it

But if you're a runner who wants to electrify the crowd and purloin a piece of baseball lore?

Then inch down that line, keep an eye on the mound, and get ready to run.

And pray that the bat stays put.