I’m curious to see what Michael Bourn does this season.
The guy is a blur, as fast as one of those superheroes in my 6-year-old’s favorite cartoons.
Bourn has led the NL in steals three straight years and he just turned 29 in December. He bunts. He slashes. He runs down everything in centerfield.
He gives the Braves a Lightning McQueen for the first time since a young and reckless Rafael Furcal made his way to the bigs 12 years ago.
Furcal ignited the Braves in those days (remember his three triples in one game in 2002?), but he wasn’t a consistent stolen base threat. He had a couple of years with 40 steals, but he didn’t break 30 in four of his six years in Atlanta.
Furcal was good. He wasn’t Bourn.
Bourn is more like Otis Nixon or Deion Sanders, pure speed guys who were always running, always creating havoc, always playing with pitchers' minds and causing nervous catchers to chew off their fingernails.
It wasn’t a question of if they were going to run; it was a question of when.
That’s Bourn. That’s what he brings to the Braves, an element that’s been MIA for nearly two decades.
Except for a few years in the early 1990s when the Braves had both Nixon and Sanders, speed was not a big part of their strategy under former manager Bobby Cox.
Marquis Grissom and Kenny Lofton followed Nixon in center until Andruw Jones began working his way into the lineup, but neither one of those guys ran much with Atlanta. Their jobs were to play defense behind one of the best starting staffs of all-time, get on base and trot home on a three-run homer.
Look who’s led the Braves in steals since 2000:
• Furcal with 40 in 2000
• Furcal with 22 in 2001
• Furcal with 27 in 2002
• Furcal with 25 in 2003
• Furcal with 29 in 2004
• Furcal with 46 in 2005
• Edgar Renteria with 17 in 2006
• Willie Harris with 17 in 2007
• Gregor Blanco with 13 in 2008
• Nate McLouth with Matt Diaz had 12 each in 2009
• Jason Heyward with 11 in 2010
Not exactly the fast and the furious.
It took Bourn just 53 games to steal 22 bases with the Braves, and he had 61 overall, counting his time with Houston.
So how high can Bourn go this season? Can he top 60? How ’bout 70? That’s a number that’s been reached only three times since 1999. It’ll be interesting to watch Fredi Gonzalez manage with the NL’s top base thief. How will he play it?
Gonzalez is a Cox protégé, serving as a Braves coach from ’03-06. The Braves had Furcal for the first three of those seasons, but not the last, when they finished last in the NL in steals. Other than Hanley Ramirez, the Marlins didn’t have a stolen base threat while Gonzalez managed in Florida, so it’s tough to tell from his past.
But judging from last season, it looks like Bourn will get enough opportunities to steal 50 or 60 bases. Gonzalez, though, also isn’t going to let him run free, even though nobody in baseball can come close to Bourn’s 215 steals the past four years.
He’s also proven he can hit. He batted .294 last season and set career highs with 193 hits, 158 games, 656 at-bats and 50 RBIs. And while Bourn strikes out a ton – 140 times in ’11 and four seasons of 100-plus – he walked enough to reach base at a .349 clip.
Oh, and if this has anything to do with it, the Braves’ last division title was in 2005. Coincidentally, Furcal stole 46 bases that season.
One more thing could be in the Braves’ favor: Bourn is in the final season of a $6.845 million deal, and we all know that some players tend to turn it up a notch in the last year of their contracts.
A Brave hasn’t led the NL in steals since Bill Bruton did it three straight years in the notoriously slow-footed 1950s, before Maury Wills and Luis Aparicio put legs back in baseball.
That will change this year.
