from Amazon
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
A simple way for teams to come up with proper stealing strategies
I have been talking about this off and on for a long time.
For every game, one of the coaches should have a list of each pitcher on the opposing team’s time home as well as their catchers’ time to second. Combined is the “time from pitcher to second.” Most coaches do, although I am not sure why they are constantly timing the pitchers during a game. Maybe they don’t have a “list” already prepared (they should) or maybe they are double checking the numbers in the list.
Anyway, as in the article, the combined time should tell a manager each player’s expected success rate against that battery. (One of the team’s saberists or statistician needs to figure out how each time corresponds to an expected success rate under normal conditions given each player’s baserunning ability and speed. That shouldn’t be too difficult.)
Once armed with that info, the manager or one of his coaches should have a list (or he can memorize the “rules of thumb") of when each player should steal or not, depending on a number of factors, such as the score, inning, out, and batter at the plate.
Of course there are other factors that go into the equation which are not so easy to prepare in advance for: The count, the type of pitcher that is likely to be thrown, the weather, ballpark, etc. Baser runners and coaches also need to be aware of pitchers who sometimes use a slide step as well. Most of these things a good base stealer takes into consideration anyway.
At the least, the manager or a coach before the game should go over with all the players, especially the base runners: “OK, you, you and can run today, but you, you, and you cannot - based on the catcher and pitcher times.”
70% (on straight steals) is a bad success rate for a player and a terrible one for a team, even if that is above the break even point. As we have pointed out many times, if you are only running when you have AT LEAST above 70% success rate or so (or whatever is break even), your overall success rate should be higher than that. And that is only for an individual runner. ALL individual base stealers should be at least several points above the break even point. Your better base stealers will be a lot higher even if they are running a lot, since against many pitcher/catcher combos they are 90% or better.
So for a team, you should have your worst runners occasionally running with a success rate of 72% or so. Your next best runners will run more with a success rate of 75%. Your best runners will steal a lot with an overall success rate of 85% or more. So for a team, their overall success rate should be close to 80%! Anything less than that has to be suboptimal.
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