This offense has surprised me

[DrungoHazewood]

18 minutes ago, Ohfan67 said:

I love stolen bases. A stolen base is one of the most exciting plays in baseball, in my opinion (and caught stealings are fun when your team is on defense). But almost every season I post about how stolen bases are basically meaningless. And I typically get hammered because that's not what the announcers and play-by-play guys say. 

If baseball were a proactive sport, actively tweaking the playing environment to encourage exciting things on the field, they'd do something like limiting throws to first to incentivize base stealing.  Or maybe they could make any throw to first that doesn't result in an out a ball on the batter.  

Or if they'd thought of this years ago they could have really enforced or strengthened the rules about minimum park dimensions, making them bigger to force teams to have fast, athletic outfielders.  They could still do that, but with almost everyone in a park <25 years old it won't have much near-term effect.

But baseball doesn't really do this.  Maybe their experiments with the Atlantic League signals a willingness to try things they haven't since the 1800s.

[jrobb21613]

I see a team with a better approach at the plate and I think our situational hitting has improved,

[thezeroes]

16 hours ago, Philip said:

How can the same number of games involve a different number of innings? We haven’t gone extras yet. 

whats the respective FIP?  

IN 2018 WE HAD AN 11 INNING. A 12 INNING AND A 14 INNING GAME, HENCE MORE INNINGS.

[Frobby]

17 hours ago, Philip said:

How can the same number of games involve a different number of innings? We haven’t gone extras yet.

whats the respective FIP?  

 

36 minutes ago, thezeroes said:

IN 2018 WE HAD AN 11 INNING. A 12 INNING AND A 14 INNING GAME, HENCE MORE INNINGS.

Also, when a team is on the road and is behind after the top of the 9th, its pitchers only throw 8 innings, not 9.     So total innings will depend on how many times the team loses on the road before the bottom of the ninth, as well as how often it goes into extra innings (and how many).

[survivedc]

5 hours ago, DrungoHazewood said:

It's fun to watch stolen bases and good baserunning.  But the correlation between runs and steals (2016-18) is 0.06.  In English that means there is essentially no relationship between stealing bases and scoring runs.  It's random whether a base stealing team scores more or less than a non-base stealing team.

That’s a pretty surprising correlation. Does that hold true over the years? Don’t know how to look that up.

 There have been less steals in recent years and more runs via long ball, I’m guessing less aggressive mindsets have affected this.

[Can_of_corn]

9 minutes ago, survivedc said:

That’s a pretty surprising correlation. Does that hold true over the years? Don’t know how to look that up.

 There have been less steals in recent years and more runs via long ball, I’m guessing less aggressive mindsets have affected this.

Why do you think I don't care about TTTP and if Sisco has a chance against baserunners?

[Ohfan67]

1 hour ago, survivedc said:

That’s a pretty surprising correlation. Does that hold true over the years? Don’t know how to look that up.

 There have been less steals in recent years and more runs via long ball, I’m guessing less aggressive mindsets have affected this.

The relationship between stolen bases and runs scored and especially wins is always very weak to zero. But baseball is weird. To the observer they can seem important in individual games, but they totally wash out over a season. Earl knew what he was talking about. 

[sportsfan8703]

Nunez having 11 RBI, and only 1 less than Mancini is surprising. RBI isn’t the best stat, but he’s at least coming through while playing. At this point, he needs to be playing a lot. 

[ShaneDawg85]

Well can't say I'm surprised by the lack of runs scored in Tampa Bay.  

[DrungoHazewood]

17 hours ago, survivedc said:

That’s a pretty surprising correlation. Does that hold true over the years? Don’t know how to look that up.

 There have been less steals in recent years and more runs via long ball, I’m guessing less aggressive mindsets have affected this.

In the deadball era there was a fairly high correlation between runs and steals, because one-run strategies like stealing and bunting and hitting-and-running were pervasive.  In an environment where the league slugging percentage was in the low .300s if you got a runner on base you were doing one or more of those things most of the time.  So lots of steals really just meant you had a lot of runners on base.

But in the live ball era, since 1920?  I doubt there's ever been a sustained period where stolen bases were significantly positively correlated with scoring.  The high point in SB since 1920 was (kind of strangely) 1987.  Here are the top teams in steals, and their rank in runs:

Cardinals 248 steals, 8th in runs (out of 26)
Padres 198 steals, 24th in runs
Brewers, 176 steals, 2nd in runs
Mariners, 174 steals, 14th in runs
Reds, 169 steals, 11th in runs

Bottom:
Orioles, 69 steals, 19th in runs
Red Sox, 77 steals, 4th in runs
Yanks, 105 steals, 9th in runs
Tigers, 106 steals, 1st in runs
Cubs, 109 steals, 20th in runs

I don't see any correlation there at all.  In modern baseball stolen bases have no consistent impact on scoring.

[DrungoHazewood]

16 hours ago, Ohfan67 said:

The relationship between stolen bases and runs scored and especially wins is always very weak to zero. But baseball is weird. To the observer they can seem important in individual games, but they totally wash out over a season. Earl knew what he was talking about. 

The tradeoff between bases and outs is steep.  A stolen base, usually of second base, is just one base.  An out is one of your 27 outs, and it takes a runner off the bases, too.  When you run the math for the difference in expected runs between all the base-out situations you end up with (in normal run context, and game situation) a break-even point of north of 70% success rate.  If you're getting caught 1/3rd of the time you're taking runs off the scoreboard, compared to just standing on first base.  The MLB stolen base success rate since WWII is 67%.  So your average stolen base attempt in the past 75 years has been worth zero runs, or maybe just slightly less than that.

 

[Redskins Rick]

16 hours ago, Ohfan67 said:

The relationship between stolen bases and runs scored and especially wins is always very weak to zero. But baseball is weird. To the observer they can seem important in individual games, but they totally wash out over a season. Earl knew what he was talking about. 

Thought you would enjoy this

 

[Redskins Rick]

4 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

The tradeoff between bases and outs is steep.  A stolen base, usually of second base, is just one base.  An out is one of your 27 outs, and it takes a runner off the bases, too.  When you run the math for the difference in expected runs between all the base-out situations you end up with (in normal run context, and game situation) a break-even point of north of 70% success rate.  If you're getting caught 1/3rd of the time you're taking runs off the scoreboard, compared to just standing on first base.  The MLB stolen base success rate since WWII is 67%.  So your average stolen base attempt in the past 75 years has been worth zero runs, or maybe just slightly less than that.

 

I agree with your analyst.

I think the SB can be important, if used correctly, getting a guy on 2nd and away from the double play ball can help keep the inning alive. yes, it does fail a bit.

Too much dependency on the SB and never running is wrong too.

 

[Frobby]

25 minutes ago, DrungoHazewood said:

The tradeoff between bases and outs is steep.  A stolen base, usually of second base, is just one base.  An out is one of your 27 outs, and it takes a runner off the bases, too.  When you run the math for the difference in expected runs between all the base-out situations you end up with (in normal run context, and game situation) a break-even point of north of 70% success rate.  If you're getting caught 1/3rd of the time you're taking runs off the scoreboard, compared to just standing on first base.  The MLB stolen base success rate since WWII is 67%.  So your average stolen base attempt in the past 75 years has been worth zero runs, or maybe just slightly less than that.

 

Yep, it’s all about success rate.    I’d expect there might be a correlation between runs and the total number of stolen bases over a 70% rate.   

In recent memory, the best Orioles’ base stealing team was the ‘06 team that featured Brian Roberts and Corey Patterson.    That team stole 121 bases (81 from Roberts and Patterson) and was thrown out only 32 times, for a 79% success rate.   So, they stole about 14 bases beyond the 70% break even point.    That was probably worth about 3-4 runs more than if they hadn’t tried to steal at all.

[OFFNY]

54 minutes ago, Redskins Rick said:

 

Thought you would enjoy this ........

 

 

o

 

Outsmarting the batter ........

 

 

 

o