Somebody Explain This To Me

The fact that everything else is zero bothers me more. How can the running game for SB be so (apparently) unoptimal but every other aspect is almost exactly perfectly optimized. Looks like somebody doesn’t know how to treat some values so they are making sure that they add up to zero. That is more bothersome. At least I can understand how players tend to have bad SB% so that can lead to negative values.

I bet if you account for leverage in the SB situations, EQSBR +/- 50 each year or at least a lot closer than it is now.

Do you have SB% for the league as a function of year?

Using 0.16 runs for a SB and -0.45 for a CS that year, the AL was at -25 runs total and the NL -32 for a grant total of -55. Not sure how EQSBR runs is calculated…

This article has a few numbers that are interesting.

The few times I have emailed anyone at BP, they have responded within a day.

But stolen base attempts are calculated as run values as if in a linear run equation?

…base-stealing tactics are not. We know that teams have been stealing too much for at least the last hundred years or so, but I don’t know of comparable research demonstrating whether runner advancement policies are/are not foolish. They may be assuming that teams are optimizing advancement fairly well.

Regarding the 5000+ runs lost to base-stealing, it’s unsurprising. Only the highest-percentage basestealers help their teams, while generally everyone else is harmful. For an amusing illustration of this effect, check out these two outliers: 1. The previous all-time record holder for steals, Lou Brock, made a negative net contribution to his teams in that category; 2. Rickey Henderson’s worst stealing season by far, in terms of run value, was his record-setting 1982 season. He set a new steals record in September, but broke the record for being caught in July.

The slide from 2003 onward, including the sharper drop since 2007, can be explained by two kinds of actual decrease. The “default” amount of steal attempts most teams make is lower than it was ten years ago, and the number of teams each year that adopt crazily aggressive basestealing is falling. Teams have been wising up about this in recent years.

If CS numbers include pickoffs as well as actual times caught stealing (which is my understanding) then this doesn’t necessarily equate to stealing too much.

Yuniesky Betancourt alone probably accounts for a couple of the EQSBR from times he dozed off on the bases.