Ever since I stopped playing baseball competitively, I’ve feared that I’d be losing some of the more subtle nuances of the game. As I’ve written before, I’m a fairly tiny man who can probably fit in the cabinet below your sink. As such, I was what you’d call a “small ball” player - a guy who you should never count on for an extra-base hit but knew how to put the ball in play or draw a walk. I wasn’t very talented by any stretch of the imagination but I took pride in the fact that once I was on the field, I knew what to do.

Having been away from the game (aside from pick-up games in Prospect Park in Brooklyn) for five years now, my views have been altered. My appreciation for “small-ball” players have greatly diminished once I learned the importance of slugging percentages. Obviously, I know it’s not the be-all-end-all and the stat still takes a backseat to OBP as far as value is concerned, but time and again, I’ve convinced myself that you can’t be that valuable to your team if you can’t at least belt 25-30HRs a year. I began to view things like the stolen base as high-risk, low-reward propositions.

Well, I was wrong.

As is often the case, it’s numbers that make me feel stupid. This time, Tom Tango, aka Tango Tiger, gives a quick cheat sheet to explain how to calculate the break-even point for stolen bases, as in, what your success rate has to be before your thieving attempts are actually worthwhile:

1. take runs per game and divide by 2 (so, a 5.0 RPG gives you 2.5.  That’s close to the breakeven of SB, 2.5, to CS, 1).
2. Figure the percentage (2.5/3.5 = 71.4%)
3. Subtract 3%
4. Breakeven is: 68.4%

In The Book, I said the breakeven point for 1999-2002 (5.0 RPG) was 68.7%.

So, a 4.0 RPG environment would give you: 2.0, which is .667, which becomes .637.  This is why it really pays to play small ball against a great pitcher.

Firstly, 68.4 is a lower percentage than I previously thought for some reason. Looking at the 2005-2007 seasons, there were 6856 stolen bases on 9360 attempts throughout baseball. That’s a 73.2% success rate.  So right off the bat, there was a lesson to be learned - trying to steal a base is a good thing (news flash, I know) in the current baseball environment. Generally speaking, today’s baserunners are good. I really forgot that.

But the bigger thing to be gained is that last sentence. In a low run-scoring environment (i.e. pitcher’s duel), the value of each out decreases. Put more simply, if you’re facing Jake Peavy, chances are pretty good that the guy at the plate is going to make an out anyway so why the hell not try and steal a bag? Conversely, in a high run-scoring environment, say, if you’re facing Jeff Weaver, you should pretty much anchor yourself to the bag. It’s hard enough for a guy like Weaver to get outs. Why should you help him by risking yourself on the bases? Makes sense, right? It’s not that stolen bases appreciate/depreciate depending upon the nature of the game. It’s that caught stealing does because the value of outs fluctuate. I’m not sure why this was a such revelatory thing for me to learn, but it really was like a light went off in my head.

There is some value in sacrifice bunts!  Hit and runs? Knock yourself out! Bunting for hits? Absolutely!

Based upon the general perception that statisticians are hell-bent on disproving old baseball axioms, it’s kind of ironic isn’t it?

I was just looking at MLB leaders in Win Shares according to The Hardball Times in response to the news that Eric Byrnes of the Diamondbacks had signed a 3-year / $30 million deal to stay in Arizona. You see, in what is shaping up to be the greatest season of his career, Byrnes is currently leading the NL in that category. But my attention was more or less occupied at that moment upon realizing that the MLB leader in Win Sharers so far was Ichiro. I wouldn’t say that I was surprised so much as curious and consequently looked at his base statistics closely for the first time in a while. Then, I was surprised.

We all think of Ichiro as a great contact hitter with good speed, and with good reason. But if my knowledge of him as a player is the norm among the general populace, then we are seriously shortchanging his amazing abilities as a base stealer. The fact that he has stolen 76 bases since the start of the 2006 season is not revelatory. But he has done so AT A 95% SUCCESS RATE. 76 swipes in 80 attempts. Think about it.

To put this into perspective, I looked at every player who had at least stolen one base since the start of the 2006 season (468 players qualified) and calculated their respective overall Run Values - which is a numerical figure as attributed to each general event in a baseball game (such as homerun, walk, stolen base, strike out, etc) as outlined in “The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball” by baseball statisticians Tom M. Tango, Mitchel G. Lichtman, and Andrew E. Dolphin. The three stat-heads basically calculated how many runs can be expected in that inning based on each of these “events”. They concluded that each Stolen Base was worth .175 runs while every time a base runner is caught stealing is worth -.467, which I think makes sense (although I may not have explained this whole thing very well).  Let’s look at Jose Reyes, who had led the MLB in stolen bases over this time.

Reyes stole 118 bases since 2006 but was caught 32 times. If you plug it into the Run Expectancy formula here’s what you get:

Reyes’ Stolen Base Run Expectancy: (118 x .175) + (32 x -.467) = 5.706

The calculation concludes that by having Reyes run as often and efficiently as he has, we can expect that he had created roughly 5.7 more runs since 2006 than if he had simply stayed put each time he got on base. Now admittedly, I’m kind of bastardizing what Tango, Lichtman and Dolphin created because I didn’t take into account things such as how many outs there were at the time of each attempt or even which base he stole, but the general idea can be reached. Now let’s look at Ichiro using the same formula:

Ichiro’s Stolen Base Run Expectancy: (76 x.175) + (4 x -.467) = 11.432

That’s a huge difference. In fact, according to this method of measurement, Ichiro is by far and away the best base stealer in baseball. Here’s the top ten.

As you can see, Reyes was able to create an additional 20.65 runs from his successful stolen base attempts, but the amount of times he failed in doing so cost the Mets 14.9  runs as well, leaving him with the aforementioned 5.706. Carl Crawford and Dave Roberts also come away looking very good according to this calculation, with a pretty big gap between their numbers and fourth place Brian Roberts.

But the undisputed king here is Ichiro. He may not have stolen as many bases as Reyes and Crawford, but his ability to pick his spots has actually created more runs. So although we think of him as a great contact hitter first and foremost, maybe we need to better appreciate him as the best base stealer playing today.

Oh, and in case you were interested in which “prolific” base stealers do more harm than good in even trying, here’s a list of players with negative Run Expectancies based on their Stolen Base statistics (minimum of 20 SBs). I hope they’re ashamed of themselves.

If you’re still reading this, you’re a bigger geek than I am. Congratulations.