Small Baseball Sux

Derek Zumsteg

One of the great things about being a lazy stathead is that even though it's beyond my resources and laziness to calculate some really cool stats (like VORP, for instance), in baseball there are a lot of low-lying fruits that, for whatever reason, no one's really looked at. Like, for instance, the relationship between stolen bases and scoring runs.

The bad thing is that as I work on an article like this, there's time for Rob Neyer to write a similar article, because when these things occur to him he has a) a full-time job to devote to them and b) the resources and experience to work them to their logical conclusion. His conclusion was that winning teams don't steal more bases than losing teams (or something).

My conclusion is that despite their seductive nature, stealing bases is a sucker's game, something which has so little to do with winning it's absurd. Below is a big chart in which stolen bases/AB is charted against runs scored in the 1998 season.  What you can see is that it's almost flat -- the rate at which a team scored runs is almost totally unrelated to the rate it stole bases.

Even I, super cynic and doubter of the value of stolen bases and small baseball, was prepared to see something there, even a weak correlation between the two, much weaker than, say, power or getting on base. But lo--

Look at those strong correlations. A 100% correlation is a sure thing: the number of times you throw ginger snaps at Brady Anderson against the number of times you get those ginger snaps taken away from you, for instance, and as it declines, the connection is less sure -- 50% correlation between tossing those snaps to times tossed out, 25% to times arrested, and so on. A 0% correlation means there's no connection: this is like the number of times I listen to DJ Qbert's "Wave Twisters" in a week against the number of wins the Marlins collect (actually.. holy moly!). 5% is what has to exist to be statistically significant and not likely to be just noise.

The correlation between stolen bases/AB to runs scored is 5.18%. The correlation between SBs to runs scored is even worse, 4%. By contrast, the correlation between slugging percentage and scoring runs is 89%, and between on-base percentage and wins is a whopping 95% -- to the point where there's almost no luck involved.

What does this mean, then? It means that stealing bases and playing little baseball is a losing strategy. It's not a way to win. Sure, it seems like a good idea, getting that runner over, but the actual gain in terms of runs scored is nearly nil, and it's much less than letting the next batter get on base, or hit a home run. Imagine this scenario, instead: You can play two strategies. On the one hand you can chew sunflower seeds and look stupid in the dugout, and the other you can get guys on base and score. Which would you choose? Which would any sane person choose?

But they don't -- few managers do. They chew their seeds, kick the bench, and play the running game like their lives depended on it. In the majors last year, on average more than two bases were stolen a game.

What's even more remarkable to me is that there's little correlation between scoring runs and stolen base percentage. I would have thought teams that run constantly, getting thrown out all the time, would have suffered greatly. Teams like the Mets, with a pathetic 57% success rate, but the overall correlation between success percentage and runs scored is only 10% (of course, that's twice as good as just stealing, so if you're going to steal and be an idiot, you can be less of an idiot by being selective).

Stolen bases don't matter. The running game doesn't matter. The only thing that scores runs is getting players on base and driving them in, any way you can. While I understand that stealing bases is exciting, and I'm sure you have stories about how stealing a base won your team game X because it seemed to change the whole feel of the game, I don't care. Playing the lower-percentage strategy is stupid, and so is everybody who looks to speed to save their team one base at a time.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg has now gone underground after being marked for death by Tony Muser and Rickey Henderson. We'll forward any mail you send at dmz@strikethree.com to his hiding place at Tony Roma's...oop, we never said that, okay?