New stats, new cards

From time to time, Topps attempts to bring the routine advancements in analysis of Baseball all the way to the Baseball Cards.

For the last year or so, a single card from an insert checklist has been kicking around my card desk, wondering what its fate will be:

These "Significant Statistics" inserts arrived in 2023 Topps Series 2.

But what the heck is a "Bolt?" I thought about titling this post in a long-time-ago now series I made up which I called "What IS That?" However that one was about unusual items seen in the image on a Baseball Card.

"Bolt" was a term I had never heard connected to the game of Baseball. Naturally, I flipped the card over as soon as I saw it. The card back did an excellent job of answering my questions about this new appellation - 

If you are reading this on 'mobile' be sure and expand/zoom that out enough to read it; it is a great card back.

"Bolts," then, is simply a measure of who is the fastest runner in Major League Baseball. It is an interesting way to look at simple raw speed, as a point of data from the game.

Note that a traditional view of the concept - who led the League in Steals in a season - is not the same thing. That's because different players play for different Managers, for one. Then also each player has varying abilities to get On Base; just imagine if Billy Hamilton had had Juan Soto's ability to judge balls vs. strikes in a split second.

Perhaps Caught Stealing % is a more accurate view of speed, but there too other factors come in to play. Maybe the NL East had a better set of starting Catchers than the AL Central did in 2022.

That difference between raw data and statistics created by the interaction of multiple players is sometimes forgotten by fans who complain about "new" statistics. Greater access to basic data about game results is not the same thing as complex, compound statistics that are the output of a whole formula.

This "Bolts" card is the only one I have from this 25 card Checklist. There is no statistic for how many times I have flipped this card over to ponder the "Bolts," again, but now that it's my annual Baseball Card season for a while, flipping this card over finally led me to check out its checklist-mates.

Those look pretty interesting to me; a new collecting goal was born from this particular Baseball Card. Thanks, Topps. This will be a small collection more about the back of the card, than the front. Because, yeah, I read the backs.