tHE 1985 sT. lOUIS cARDINALS dID sOMETHING yOU'LL nEVER sEE aGAIN IN bASEBALL

There are base stealers, and then there are base stealers... then there are teams like the 85 St. Louis Cardinals. Read more to see how ridiculous of a base-stealing team they were...

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Vince Coleman came into the major leagues as a rookie in 1985. He hit a respectable .267 with 1 HR and 40 RBI. Whatever, right? Well, he also scored 107 runs and stole 110 bases. That, my friends, is not a typo. But this is about the team: the 1985 Cardinals.

First, to put this into perspective, in 2019, the Texas Rangers led all of Major League Baseball with 131 stolen bases. Furthermore, since 1997, only one team in baseball has stolen more than 200 bases in a single season. 

The St. Louis Cardinals stole 314 bases in 1985. That is also not a typo.

Check this out - and this is where we get to the "You'll never see this happen again in baseball" part.  The 1985 Cardinals had:

• One player over 100 stolen bases (Vince Coleman: 110).
• One player over 50 stolen bases (Willie McGee: 56 - also the NL MVP).
• Three players over 30 stolen bases (Andy Van Slyke: 34; Ozzie Smith 31; Tom Herr: 31).
• Two more players over 10 stolen bases (Terry Pendleton: 17; Lonnie Smith: 12).

In fairly-recent years, guys like Dee Gordon and Jonathan Villar set the bases on fire with 60+ steals in a season, to which we say, "Whatever, bro." 

In the years following the Cardinals' 1985 season, only 13 teams in all of baseball stole over 200 bases in a single season, and the Cardinals did it 6 times. With the current state of power-hitting and station-to-station, strikeout-laden baseball, it is very unlikely that we'll ever see a team come close to this type of base stealing ever again.

P.S. One other thing we'll never see in baseball again is Tom Herr's stat line: in 1985, Tom Herr hit .302 with 8 HR and 110 RBI. That is ALSO not a typo. 

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Got anything you want to run by us in terms of other things we'll never see in baseball again? Feel free to comment on our post and we might just write about it.