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Thursday, May 24, 2007
Stolen Bases in college ball
A quick look at steals in college ball over at Baseball Analysts, with my comments reproduced here:
The break-even % in MLB is not close to 75%, but more like 68 or 69%. A little quibble, but probably important for the reasons: throwing errors.
I imagine in college ball, there are more throwing errors per SB attempt than in MLB. That’s a huge benefit.
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Not knowing how the regression was run (exactly what are the parameters used), it’s hard to say the impact of the causation of the parameters ("correlation is not causation").
I will point out that the *difference* between the run value of the SB and CS according to your findings is around .60 to .65 runs, be it in MLB or college ball. This is consistent with the actual run values of SB and CS that we reported in The Book.
Furthermore, the breakeven point for any baseball game is based on the run environment. This chart for example shows you the run values of events for various environments:
http://www.tangotiger.net/customlwts.html
It’s very possible that the reason college ball has so many SB is simply that the talent level of the runners v the pitcher/catcher is simply that much higher than in MLB. I imagine college ball is filled with Juan Pierre-types, and are not abundant with IRod-types.
That distribution balance is likely what causes the number of SB in college ball.
I am surprised that the BA printed this article without some prior review. Using a regression to determine the impact of the stolen base and CS without controlling for the overall offensive quality of the teams is ridiculous. In the article, is there a reference to the average SB/CS ratio in college? This is critical. I assume, as does Tango, that it is much higher and that is why they steal so many bases. Not to mention the errors. The article says that the cost of the caught stealing in college is much lower. I seriously doubt that that is true. The value of the CS is mainly a function of the run environment. Is not the run environment in college much higher? I would say that the cost of the CS in college is more than in MLB, not less. There is really not enough info/data in this article to make much sense of anything, and as the authors imply, the regressions don’t tell us much of anything either.