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Wednesday, August 19, 2009
What kind of player steals third with 2 outs with his team losing and the batter with a 2-0 count?
I was expecting to see another Steve Pyscho Lyons stealing with Wade Boggs batting. But, no, it’s Ichiro, one of the best baserunners of our generation:
If you missed it, Ichiro was on second base, with Lopez over at first and Branyan hitting, with two outs in the 7th inning. The team was down 4-2. Ichiro tried to steal third, and was thrown out by a couple of feet to end the inning.
As a tactical decision, attempting to steal third in that situation is indefensible. He’s already in scoring position, and he’s really fast, so he’s going to score on pretty much any base hit to the outfield. Russ Branyan, as you might know, is not a particularly big threat to get an infield hit. The situations where Ichiro would be able to take advantage of moving up in that situation, scoring on a play where he wouldn’t be able to from second base, are basically limited to passed balls and wild pitches. Those happen too infrequently to bet on in almost every situation.
In the average example of that situation, a successful steal of third base adds about 0.5% to the team’s chances of winning. Getting thrown out removes about 7.5% from the team’s chances of winning. The out is fifteen times more costly than getting in safely is beneficial. In order to justify the decision, Ichiro would have had to be successful 94% of the time – that’s the break even number.
I love Ichiro. He is both underrated and overrated at the same time. His batting average is mostly singles, but he fills it up with baserunning and fielding. In short, he’s a great player, but not for the reason most commonly cited (hits, batting average). I was away this weekend, so I didn’t see the play.
This is the way to figure out if someone made the right choice on a high-risk play: if it takes a perfect throw to get you out, you probably had at least an 85% chance of being safe. That is, the perfect throw/catch/tag probably happens 10-15% of the time. If you see that happen, then you can guess that the runner was justified in going for the extra base as he’s being tagged out. You give him a break.
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