Throwback Thursday: Otis Nixon Steals Six Bases in a Single MLB Game

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

How do you steal a record-tying six bases in a single Major League Baseball game? Well, for starters, it helps to be fast.

It also helps to be pissed off. Which brings us to Otis Nixon.

On April 1, 1991, Nixon was traded from the Montreal Expos to the Atlanta Braves in an otherwise unnoteworthy four-player deal. Nixon was 32 years old, an intriguing but troubled talent who had spent the 1980s playing for three different franchises while battling a reported cocaine habit. The best he'd ever hit in terms of average was .263, but Nixon was a base stealer, and in the previous three years, he had honed his craft, stealing 50 bases for Montreal in 1990.

Nixon was not happy with the trade, mostly because the Braves had gone 65-97 and finished last in the National League East in 1990, while the Expos had gone 85-77 and finished third. "I was mad with (the Expos)," he told an interviewer in 2015. "They traded me to the worst team. My family didn't even want to go to the games."

So Nixon decided to exact his revenge the best way he knew how. In mid-June of 1991, the Braves faced the Expos in a three-game series. Already 31-25, the Braves were on their way to a far better season; it turned out Nixon had lucked into the leadoff spot with an up-and-coming franchise. He was determined to show his former club what they'd missed out on. Nixon was quiet through the first two games—and then, on June 16th, he found his opening.

Nixon led off the top of the first with a base hit. Then, with teammate Terry Pendleton at the plate, he stole second. After Pendleton reached on an infield hit, Nixon stole third, and then scored on a Ron Gant double.

In the top of the third, Nixon bunted for a base hit. Then, with Pendleton at the plate again, he stole both second and third base before scoring on a Lonnie Smith single. And in the top of the ninth, with the Braves trailing 7-6, Nixon did what he could to provide the equalizing run: he stole second base, and after Pendleton and Smith struck out he stole third—which may have been a little crazy, but was also in line with the unpredictable nature of his life and career. A Gant strikeout ended the game, but Nixon had tied the major-league record for stolen bases in a single game, set by Eddie Collins back in 1912.

Nixon would wind up with 72 steals that season; the Braves would rebound from that Montreal series, winning 94 games and playing in the their first World Series since 1958, and the first of five World Series they would play in the 1990s. Nixon didn't play in that Series—he was suspended for violating MLB's drug policy that September—but he did return to Atlanta the next year to make one of the best catches in Braves history, against the Pittsburgh Pirates' Andy Van Slyke.

Remarkably, in an era when the stolen base still held primacy as an art form, Nixon was only second in the National League in steals in 1991, behind former teammate Marquis Grissom, who finished with 76. He was one of the last pure base-stealers to come along before the game began to change; since 2000, only one player—Jose Reyes in 2007—has eclipsed the 72 steals Nixon had during that 1991 season.

"They can't steal six bases in a week," Nixon told a magazine in 2010, when asked if the record he tied would ever be broken. "I give them one week to steal six bases, any guy out there right now. Not one game…. A week. It's not bragging, but that's how dominant Rickey Henderson, Vince Coleman, and Deion Sanders, Kenny Lofton were, that's what we thrived on. We had some guys who could just flat-out run. I could have stolen eight in one game if I had got on that many times. I give guys now a whole week to get a shot."

OK, so maybe there was a bit of braggadocio in Nixon's challenge. Two other players, Eric Young and Carl Crawford, have matched his number since. But it's clear Nixon was a born base-stealer, as evidenced by a video taken last year, when he breaks down the tells of a couple of his former teammates, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz.

"We're creatures of habit," Nixon said. "Everybody's got a way of talking and thinking and doing something. If we're not conscious of it, you repeatedly to the same thing over and over again…. I'd read a pitcher and watch him, within the second inning I could tell you exactly what you have."

Nixon lasted 17 seasons in MLB thanks to that ability, and he is 14th on the all-time stolen base list. He played until 1993 in Atlanta, and then bounced from team to team until 1999, when he briefly returned to the Braves before retiring at age 40. Perhaps predictably, his life following baseball has been troubled.

In 2010, Nixon reportedly gave an interview on satellite radio claiming he had overcome drug and alcohol addictions. Since then, however, he has been arrested multiple times, including in 2013 after police found a crack pipe in his pocket and suspected crack rock in the driver's seat during a traffic stop, and in 2015 for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and permitting an unlicensed person to drive. In 2014, his ex-wife, Atlanta soul singer Candi Staton, told Atlanta magazine that being married to Nixon was "hell on earth."

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