The Baseball 100: No. 98, Carlos Beltrán

Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy. 

There are certain ways you know that you are growing old as a baseball writer. One of those ways is when you start seeing the sons of players you covered become big leaguers … and then become big-league stars. Another is when players you covered become managers.

And then there is the daunting moment when a player you remember watching as a young, scared kid full of potential and doubts goes into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I have no doubt that Carlos Beltrán will someday make me feel even older soon.

For most of his career, Beltrán was not seen as a Hall of Famer. His career was impacted by three special effects that I believe clouded his greatness so it was harder for people to see. Well, to be fair, it was more than three special effects. Beltran never won an MVP award. He had a strong case in 2006, but finished fourth. His next-highest finish was ninth — MVP voting definitely guides people’s perceptions.

He also never led the league in any major category. He finished second a bunch: twice in runs scored, once in doubles, once in triples, once in stolen bases and so on. But there is no black ink on his record — Bill James referred to league-leading totals as “Black Ink,” because it is usually denoted in bold — and that too has an impact. And now, we will wait to see what an MLB investigation finds about his involvement in the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal.

But mainly, I think there are three reasons Beltrán, at least until the end of his career, was underrated and underappreciated.

Special effect 1: He played his first few years for Kansas City when the Royals were terrible and, more to the point, practically invisible. I wrote columns about the Royals in those days for the Kansas City Star, and in those days the Royals seemed to be in another league. They were never in the news. In the regular season, they dropped out of contention pretty much on Opening Day. In the offseason, they were never in on any big trades or free agents. Becoming a Royals player was a witness protection program option back then.

When Beltrán went to Houston and had his playoffs for the ages, people acted like he had landed from some other dimension. Who is this guy? As I’ve written before, someone said to me during that postseason, “OK, but you didn’t know he was this good,” and I’ve heard plenty of Royals fans tell me they heard the same thing.

Only we did know. 

Special effect 2: In the ninth inning of the decisive game of the 2006 National League Championship Series, the Mets were down two runs and Cardinals rookie Adam Wainwright was trying to close things out. The Mets managed to load the bases with two outs. And then Beltrán came to the plate. 

The first pitch was a fastball that Beltrán let go for a strike. 

The second pitch was a curveball he swung at and tapped foul off his front leg.

And the third was a curveball that Wainwright was trying to throw into the dirt to get Beltrán to chase. Instead, he threw it high and it broke right into the strike zone and Beltrán watched it go by for strike three.

Yes, he was fooled on a pitch at exactly the wrong time, and forever after there would be at least one person in the crowd howling, “Swing the bat, Carlos!” That’s just how it goes sometimes.

Special effect 3: Beltrán was a unicorn, a player so graceful that he made it look too easy. He seemed to be cruising at about 85 percent of his potential, and so the constant storyline that hounded him was, “He should be better.” I recall former GM Steve Phillips once criticizing Beltrán for various intangible and unprovable crimes (not making enough “plays,” not being a leader, not coming through in the clutch) and that was sort of the general vibe that people felt about Beltrán.

But how much better could he have been, really? For more than a decade, he was everything. He was, for some of those years, the best defensive center fielder in the game. He was, for some of those years, the best baserunner in the game. He was the greatest percentage base stealer in baseball history. He switch-hit with power — he’s 28th all-time in doubles, 34th all-time in total bases, top 50 in homers and RBIs and runs created. 

He also had perhaps the greatest postseason in baseball history in 2004 when he slugged better than 1.000 in 12 games, hitting eight homers, stealing six bases, scoring 21 runs, etc.

I’ve written about Beltrán so many times … I’ve talked at some length about seeing him for the first time in 1999 at the dearly departed Baseball City. You probably don’t remember: For a time in the 1980s, the Royals played their spring training baseball at this oddball amusement park called Boardwalk and Baseball. By the time Beltrán came around, it was a ghost. We called it Baseball City because that sounded funny, but it was actually a pretty sad place at the end (though you could still see where the roller coaster used to be, and it always had the slightest whiff of cotton candy).

The Royals were sad by then, too. They had no owner. They had no direction. They had a nice man named Herk Robinson running the team, though he seemed to prefer gardening to baseball. But they were as hopeless as hopeless could be, and that’s when a 22-year-old Carlos Beltrán showed up. He spoke little English. He was paralyzingly shy. But the talent was already awe-inspiring. “He can be as good as he wants to be,” a then-assistant GM named Allard Baird told reporters. The Royals told him they didn’t care if he hit at all, they just wanted him to play solid defense. He hit .293, scored and drove in 100 runs, and won the Rookie of the Year.

Let me try to just talk about watching him run from first to third.

I’ve never seen anyone do it better. He barely seemed to be trying — that, as mentioned, was both his gift and curse — but he soared. He glided. The Royals in his early days had better hitters than you might expect  — Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye, Mike Sweeney, Raúl Ibañez — and when Beltrán was on first and someone cracked a hit to right field, you could feel an excitement buzzing around the stadium. Beltrán seemed to break through some sort of time portal. His feet barely seemed to touch the ground. It was this gorgeous optical illusion; he seemed to run directly across the field.

There have been faster players than Beltrán, of course. But then, there were faster receivers than Jerry Rice. Rice’s gift was the genius of precision; he ran routes so exact that they said he stepped in his own spike marks. So with Beltrán, his jump impossibly fast, his stride like a sprinter’s, the way he took the base utterly perfect, the lovely geometry of it all.

I would hear people complain about Carlos Beltrán and how he should be so much better and I would think, “Have you not seen this man go from first to third?”

And: His defense. Once the Angels’ Garret Anderson crushed a drive into the right-field gap, and it was a double for sure, and the Royals pitcher that day, Brian Anderson, slapped his glove on his thigh in frustration. Beltrán, impossibly, ran the ball down, caught it, then wheeled and fired to first base and doubled off Chone Figgins, who was so sure the ball was uncatchable that he was rounding third base at the time.

“You know what blew me away,” Brian Anderson would say. “There was no way he could catch that ball. No way. And then, he not only catches it, he catches it by his side. He doesn’t have to dive. He doesn’t have to stretch. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

To Anderson, it would be something unforgettable. But what made it so absurd was that it didn’t seem unforgettable at the time. So many people that day saw it and thought, “Nice catch.” Because that’s how easy Beltrán made it look. He did stuff like that all the time. Once he raced back on a Mike Cameron fly ball, jumped as he got to the wall and stole a top-of-the-wall double or a home run. To the untrained eye, it was a good play. But to people in and around the game, people who had played the outfield, people who had seen thousands of games and catches, it made their eyes fall out of their heads.

“I’ve been to two hog killings and a county fair,” pitcher Curt Leskanic said. “And I haven’t seen anything like what Beltrán did tonight.”

Beltrán did garner appreciation in the last few years of his career, when he became the old man, particularly in his time on the Yankees and Astros. They finally appreciated his love for the sport, after he’d played through too many injuries, when he kept coming back and performing even with his body wrecked.

I don’t think most people thought Carlos Beltrán would play until he was 40. But he did. He spent the last years of his career in San Francisco, St. Louis, back in New York with the Yankees, to the Rangers and finally back in Houston, where this time his team won the World Series.

He had plenty of moments. He made two All-Star teams with the Cardinals in his mid-30s. He was no longer a great player — his speed was gone, he was a defensive liability — but he could still mash the ball. He made his last All-Star team with the Yankees at age 39, when he hit .304 with 22 homers in 99 games. 

You can have a lot of fun with Beltrán’s offensive numbers because so few players have had been able to do so many things on a baseball diamond.

• 400 homers, 500 doubles, 1,500 RBIs, 1,500 runs, 300 stolen bases: Only Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Carlos Beltrán.

• 400 homers, 500 doubles, 1,500 RBIs, 1,500 runs, 300 stolen bases and 50 triples: Only Mays, Bonds and Beltrán.

• 400 homers, 550 doubles, 1,500 RBIs, 1,500 runs, 300 stolen bases: Only Bonds and Beltrán.

• 400 homers, 500 doubles, 1,500 RBIs, 1,500 runs, 300 stolen bases, fewer than 50 caught stealing: Only Beltrán. 

But this sort of number shuffling is just for fun. Beltrán was not Mays, Bonds or A-Rod — he was not Henry Aaron or Stan Musial or Ted Williams either. He was a glorious player who was not always seen.

And now, incredibly, he is the manager of the New York Mets. Time goes by so fast.

I must end with that game in 2003, a Royals-Diamondbacks game I think about all the time. That whole 2003 season was confusing for the Royals. They lost 100 games in 2002 and the lost 100 games in 2004 and 2005 and 2006. But somehow in 2003 they were in contention. And in September they played the Diamondbacks, and it was an actual big game.

In the ninth inning, the Royals were down a run and they were facing Arizona’s closer Matt Mantei, who at his peak was one of the hardest throwers in baseball history to that point. He was throwing hard that day, hard enough that the Royals didn’t seem to have a chance. With one out, Beltrán came to the plate and in a seven-pitch at-bat he was vividly overpowered. But he fouled off pitches and drew a walk.

Then he stole second.

Then he stole third.

Then he scored on a sacrifice fly that was so short, the second baseman could have caught it. Instead, the right fielder raced in and fired home and Beltrán simply beat the throw.

It was one of the most staggering displays I’ve ever seen on a baseball field. After the game (which the Royals eventually lost because, you know, they were the Royals), I asked Allard Baird what he thought.

“He can do anything,” Baird said. And that’s exactly how I remember Carlos.

Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.

(Photo: Doug Benc / Getty Images)