One of the great things about this era of baseball is that it’s a golden age for the stolen base. This is often lost amid all the grousing about the characterless quality of a game played by muscled-up home run hitters in sterile shopping malls, but that it’s so can be demonstrated in any number of ways.

For nearly two decades now, for instance, it has usually taken about 60 steals to lead a league, about twice what it usually took to lead the league from the end of the dead ball era through the beginning of the 1960s. From 1952 to 1958, no one in the American League stole as many as 30 bases. Today’s game is fast, by historical standards.

Today’s game also highlights many brilliant runners, and while they aren’t as good as some players of the last generation, such as Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines, that’s alright. Those were the best base runners of all time. Today’s best, like Carlos Beltran (a career 247 steals in 281 attempts) and Ichiro Suzuki (82 steals in 88 attempts the past two years), aren’t as prolific as their predecessors, but they’re incredibly efficient, and so reflect their time. Today’s managers are appreciative of the downside of a stolen base attempt, and most run a game reflecting an awareness that you have to steal two for every one time caught just to break even on the base paths, which often makes the best stolen base opportunity the one that wasn’t taken.

Efficiency, though, works a bit better on the scoreboard than it does from the stands. The rise of the thief most valued for his ability to not make outs may be a blow struck for reason, but marveling at someone’s career stolen base percentage does not carry the same thrill as watching some reckless pirate stealing bases completely at will.

This is one of the things that makes Jose Reyes such a wonderful player to watch; he isn’t quite as efficient as Beltran or Suzuki, but he more than makes it up in sheer quantity. There was a point in late August, after Reyes had stolen 15 bases in 15 attempts, when it looked as if he really might be able to reach 100 for the year. This won’t happen as he’s since been reined in down the stretch, but he may well be able to reach the century mark next year.

One of the really impressive things about Reyes’s stolen base totals (he had 75 entering last night’s game) is that he doesn’t run all that much in garbage time. Everyone can name some basketball player they dislike for racking up as many points as possible when a game is out of hand one way or the other, and stolen base kings have long done the same, pouring on the steals in the late innings of games safely put away. Reyes does a bit of that from time to time, but after checking every base he’s stolen this season, I learned that only 23% of his 93 attempts have come when the Mets were either ahead or behind by more than two runs. Sixty-eight percent of the time, he’s run when the Mets were tied, up one, or down one, and he’s 19 for 23 in the latter two situations — the most crucial in the game.

All of this, rather than reflecting on Reyes, really reflects on the way Willie Randolph uses him, which is targeted and smart. Most of the time Reyes runs, he’s doing it in the early innings of a scoreless game. This is when a stolen base attempt is most valuable. In the late innings, the downside to a caught steal makes it risky, while early in the game it’s comparatively less so; more important, though, is the great advantage a team gets by scoring first.

I wonder, though, if Randolph might not be a bit too cautious with Reyes. Thirty-six percent of stolen base attempts in the National League come with two outs; 23% of Reyes’s attempts come in that situation. Naturally, part of this is that as a leadoff hitter, Reyes bats with two outs less often than the average player, and part is that he has a great lineup behind him. But other numbers hint at a pattern. Fifty-six percent of Reyes’s stolen base attempts come in the first three innings, for example, while the league average is 41%. Even though there are natural enough reasons for this, it still seems like a large spread.

Randolph is likely using Reyes close to ideally, sending him at points of relatively low risk with modest return and holding him back when losing a base runner would be a bigger loss than a free base would be a gain. Still, there’s some slack yet, and as dominant a runner as Reyes has been in the regular season, if Randolph turns him fully loose in October, he’ll be even more of a terror than he is now — and even more of a blast to watch.

tmarchman@nysun.com