Day Forty Eight: Henry Cotto


Henry Cotto had an excellent mustache and was born in New York City when that was a really common place for great baseball players to be born. He ran the bases like a champ and had great range in the field. He was a perfect 4th outfielder for the Mariners during the early days of relevance. In 1988 he stole 27 bases and was only caught 3 times. His yearly numbers are pretty much all like this. He didn't run a ton, but he made it when he did. Harold Reynolds on the other hand, was thought of by many in Seattle as an excellent baserunner, but in reality HR was quite terrible. In 1988 Harold stole 35 bags...and was caught 29 times. Can you even imagine that happening today? What would it take to allow someone to kill that many runs in the era of analytics? It's an amazing feat. But so is Henry Cotto's career line of 130 steals and 26 caught stealing. That is an 80 percent success rate. I can't tell you how good that is. It's elite. And Cotto could do that. And he looked great doing it. He will always be the best leftfielder of the "who is our leftfielder?" era of Mariners baseball as well. I enjoyed watching him play and often wanted to play the field like him. But I wasn't nearly fast enough. So I had to just admire Henry's skills from afar. But I couldn't do this series without acknowledging Henry Cotto's influence on my desired style of baseball and why I would subsequently love players like Kenny Lofton and Lance Johnson. Henry Cotto was my first foray into the smooth fielding speedster type of player and I have loved players like that ever since. He was also a big plus in the Jay Buhner trade. Can't believe that Ken Phelps drew so much talent!

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