Helmets, Baby.

The glorious recent history of head protection sitting on the ground.

Was watching a game from 1979 the other day. Larry Bowa doubled in the first inning, and when the play was over, this happened: 

You might be surprised, if you were born after 1979, to learn that some hitters used to ditch the batting helmet once they reached base. Most didn’t, but some did. (In the 1979 game, both Bowa and Garry Maddox did, but nobody else.) The practice had died out by the time I started forming memories a few years later, but it was still technically kind of allowed until 2010, when the Official Baseball Rules clarified the helmet requirement: 

3.08(a) All players shall use some type of protective helmet while at bat and while running the bases.

That rule is now unambiguous, but also a lie. Baserunners run the bases without helmets all the time. They just have to start the play with a helmet. After that, things happen.

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There have always been no-helmet guys. Oneil Cruz is the current king of the No-Helmet Guys.

Cruz has scored 28 runs this year, nine of them on his own home runs. Of the 19 other scores—when he had to run the bases at high speeds and in stages—he has managed to reach home without losing his helmet only five times.

If we ignore all of his non-competitive advances—when he reached on a walk, for instance, or scored on a teammate’s home run—then he lost his helmet 18 times on 35 running events, noted below in bold. 

A lot of No-Helmet Guys will lose their helmets at specific parts of the field. There are players whose helmets come off mostly/only on head-first slides, or mostly when they’re turning around third base to score, or mostly when they’re stretching for a triple and their gait becomes a bit more gallopy. Cruz is notable because his helmet comes off in any situation and, frequently, almost immediately. He will sometimes lose his helmet without reaching base at all. 

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Before Oneil Cruz was the king of the No-Helmet Guys, Jorge Polanco arguably was. His helmet, too, would fall off almost every time he reached base and sometimes on swings. But being a No-Helmet Guy isn’t an immutable trait. Sometimes players start out as No-Helmet Guys and over time they change. We can see this most clearly if we look at Polanco’s helmet retention rate on triples—triples being, in helmet-loss analysis, the closest thing we have to a perfect laboratory setting. Here are the helmet results for all of Polanco’s career triples, ordered chronologically. (The first three are missing because they pre-date Statcast’s video archiving.)

• 4. Kept

• 5. Kept

• 6. Kept

• 7. Kept

• 8. Kept

• 9. Lost (near third base)

• 10. Lost (unknown where)

• 11. Lost (near third base)

• 12. Lost (sometime before second base)

• 13. Lost (near third base)

• 14. Lost (near first base)

• 15. Lost (rounding second base)

• 16. Lost (before second base)

• 17. Lost (before second base)

• 18. Kept

• 19. Kept

• 20. Kept… sort of. 

That last one, his helmet was still on when he slid into third. But the throw to third hit him in the head. It knocked off his helmet, which rolled 20 feet away.

Polanco grew out of his no-helmets youthfulness, just in time for a helmet to save his life!

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Gary Matthews (the dad) used to be a very intentional No Helmet Guy, in the 1980s. Unlike Oneil Cruz and Jorge Polanco, whose helmets fell off naturally, Matthews would often flip his off on purpose as soon as he started running. He felt wearing a helmet got in the way. 

A few years ago, a reader named Jacob wrote to me about a Ramón Laureano hustle double. To Jacob’s eye, it looked like Laureano had decided to flip his helmet off at precisely the moment he decided to stretch the single into a double, like flipping off the helmet was the baseball equivalent of gummiberry juice. To Jacob, this raised the question of whether Laureano runs faster—or thinks he runs faster?—without a helmet. 

The video of that play is lost—you can see the double, but not the replays that show Laureano’s helmet removal—but there are other examples of Laureano ditching a helmet right around the time he makes a decision to push for an extra base. Here he is coming around first base on what would become a close triple. 

Stage 1. He reaches up to steady his wobbly helmet
Stage 2. [Off screen, which broadcaster helpfully describes as “Laureano off to the races, flips the helmet off!”]
Stage 3. Look at that guy flying, his head exposed to all!

Stage 1, I think, is the clue that ditching one’s helmet on purpose is not primarily about speed, but about removing a rattling, view-obstructing loose helmet. The way I figure it, there are three levels of helmet tightness: 

1. Snug. These helmets never fall off. I’ve been watching Wyatt Langford and I’d guess he will retire and perhaps be inducted into the Hall of Fame without his helmet ever coming off. He wears it snug. There’s no rustle. Charlie Blackmon is a snug helmeter. 

2. Loose. For some reason, lots of players seem to like a helmet that isn’t too snug, that won’t cut off their blood circulation. This is the fairly common standard: Kinda loose. These players’ helmets will often come off while they’re diving, for example, but not while they’re running. But their loose helmets do need to periodically be steadied while they’re running. Once you notice this, you see it constantly: Guy rounding first base on a double, his hand on top of his helmet. It’s not the optimal running posture.

Worse for him, the longer the run the more wobbly it gets. The runner’s gait gets choppier as he tires, perhaps, or the helmet just gets a little looser as the accumulated energy searches for an outlet. This is why triples produce so many more lost helmets than doubles, and why very few runners (Oneil Cruz excepted) lose their helmets on the way to first. 

So at best the runner is stuck holding his helmet down. At worst, he gets his vision obscured, like Adam Rosales did in the Clayton Kershaw’s Most Frustrating Start game that I recently watched: 

If you aren’t careful, you can look like a dork. 

So for some runners, the solution to this, paradoxically, seems to be: 

3. Even Looser. This way, the helmet just falls off at the slightest provocation. Taken to an extreme, the loose helmet will come off almost every time you move, as with Oneil Cruz. I once saw Dominic Smith lose his helmet on a home run trot. 

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Bryce Harper loses a lot of helmets. CJ Abrams loses a lot of helmets. Anthony Volpe loses a lot of helmets. Ryan Bliss loses a lot of helmets. A lot of your favorite players to watch lose their helmets. Hunter Renfroe does not lose his helmet.

We’ve seen a bump in No-Helmet Guys in recent years (though I can’t easily compare the current era to decades ago, when there might have been even more). We can see this in the triples. I surveyed 100 triples from 2016 and 100 triples from 2024. This year, 20 percent of triples end helmetless. In 2016, it was 11 percent. 

We can also see it as well in inside-the-park home runs: 

• 2017-2019: 22 percent of helmets came off

• 2020-2021: 26 percent off

• 2022-2024: 43 percent off

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Somebody once sent me a clip of Luis Arráez’ helmet coming off as he ran down the third base line and wondered if Arráez had flipped it off strategically—if he was leaving a helmet to potentially get in the way of a one-hop throw home. 

 

I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking that—you can see his helmet sliding over his eyes as he took off, meaning it was probably loose enough to fall off on its own, and meaning that if Arráez did eject it on purpose it was presumably to preserve his ability to see. However, it is interesting that of all the times Arráez has scored on sacrifice flies in his career, the helmet only came off this way twice—and both times were on throws coming home from left field, down the third base line, on close plays. The one above, and the one below, when his helmet came stunningly close to catching Alex Gordon’s throw home: