Mallex Smith of the Seattle Mariners and His Helmet Stats of 2019

If you could not tell from my Tastes of T-Mobile Park series I went to a lot of baseball games during the 2019 season. Besides trying out the different ballpark foods I was busy watching the Mariners play their games and get to know some of their players a little bit better than I had in seasons past. One of the players that I ended up focusing on was Mallex Smith.

Mallex Smith was one of the many new faces to the Mariners rosters in 2019. The Mariners only had a small handful of returning players on the roster since they had traded away James Paxton (a.k.a. Big Maple), Jean Segura, Robinson Cano, Edwin Diaz, and others during the off season. Knowing that some of my favorite players from the previous season were now gone from my favorite team I knew I had to look for new players to get excited about and follow. Mallex was one of the bigger names to join the Mariners in 2019 and he had a fun name and seemed to have a fun personality so I eventually gravitated to following his game play a bit more than some of the other 2019 Mariners.One of the first things that I noticed about Mallex (okay, second thing because the first thing I noticed was that his number was 0 and I think that number should only be used for mascots) was that he was a speedy player that never seemed to be able to keep his helmet on when he ran, especially in his attempts to steal bases. As the season continued on I kept noticing this and about halfway through the season it got me really thinking about how much of the time he was able to keep his helmet on.

04.01.19 Mariners Game

The thought of how often Mallex Smith's helmet came off in the 2019 season is something that has stuck with me. Since there is no telling when we will get to see Mallex Smith run around the bases and see if his helmet flings off anytime soon I decided to go into a deep dive into the video archives that MLB now has available online to check out how often his helmet really did come off.I hope you enjoy this research as much as I did and that it brings you a bit of baseball joy back into your life during this crazy, unprecedented, and baseball-less time. ⚾

Mallex Smith captured the most stolen bases in MLB for the 2019 season with 46 stolen bases. I reviewed all of the clips of these 46 stolen bases and found out that nearly 70% of the time Mallex lost his helmet during these plays.

There is a small percentage of "unknown" due to the fact that the clips on MLB that are referencing this play from Mallex but do not visually show Mallex stealing the base so therefore I could not determine if his helmet came off (but looking at this, it is most likely that it did come off during those plays). Those "unknown" plays were 2 of the 46 total stolen bases.

To further break down when and where each of these stolen base plays happened, I looked specifically at the breakdown of "If Mallex was on 1st base and stole 2nd base did his helmet come off?" and so on with the other possible scenarios. Here are my findings:

Of the cases when Mallex Smith was on 1st base and stole 2nd base, there was one instance of "unknown" for the total of 38 times Mallex successfully stole 2nd base.Also, if you are looking for one of my favorite Mallex clips as I was working through all of this, check out this one from the July 19th game versus the Angels where Mallex's helmet was so, so, so close to staying on but it just could not hang on. (As I was watching this clip for the first time I was going "Oh, oh, oh. Is it going to stay on?") While you're at it, also check out the clip from July 3rd when Mallex's helmet comes off but the Cardinals catcher's mask also flies off while trying to make the play.

For this set of data, there were two "unknown" instances of the seven total times Mallex stole 3rd base. There was only one instance classified as Mallex's helmet not falling off but it was a tricky call for me to make. I am referencing Mallex stealing 3rd on April 7th, 2019 because as I was reviewing the footage, Mallex's helmet almost comes off but he catches it before it completely falls off. You can review the footage here and see if you agree with my call there. But all of the other times (4 out of the 7) Mallex's helmet clearly fell off.

This last graph is a little extreme because it is only for a sample size of one instance but it still proves the point that Mallex's helmet doesn't tend to stay on his head. Mallex stole home plate and his helmet fell off! Even more impressive is that this happened at the game on May 27th versus the Texas Rangers and Mallex stole 2nd, 3rd, and home in the 8th inning of the game and with each steal that he accomplished his helmet came off!

During 2019 Mallex stole a lot of bases and surprisingly did not get caught stealing very often in comparison. There was no instance during the 2019 season in which he was on 2nd or 3rd base and was then caught stealing. He was only caught stealing in attempts of going from 1st to 2nd base and that only happened six times during the season. And keeping with the trends seen earlier his helmet came off a lot then too.

It was only one out of the six times Mallex was caught stealing that his helmet stayed on during the 2019 season. Another interesting trend with this was that four out of the six times (66.6% of the time) he was caught stealing were at games back at T-Mobile Park.

Going back to Mallex's successful attempts of stealing bases I wanted to see if it happened more at home or away games. Overall the split between where Mallex got his steals was relatively equal with 25 steals at home games and 21 steals at away games. As I did this breakdown, here are the results I found:

The "unknown" value was 2 plays for this data set. All but three of the total plays in this data set were for stealing 2nd base (two of the plays were when Mallex stole 3rd and the other was his steal of home plate).

There was only one "unknown" play for when Mallex was stealing a base at the away games. Five of these plays were when Mallex stole 3rd base, which is about a fourth of the data within this set.Mallex Smith lost his helmet in stealing bases on a more frequent basis at games in T-Mobile Park then when he was traveling around elsewhere in the league.

In conclusion, Mallex Smith was MLB's star of stealing bases in 2019. Mallex was not just a star for his success rate but for the entertaining factor of seeing if his helmet would stay on any time he went for it. 🧢