As a child my first baseball heros were Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Maury Wills. I was absolutely in love with the dream of hitting homers, making great stops defensively but above all else the glory of sliding in the dirt and then ceremonious dusting off of the uniform after the ump had called time to allow myself to nonchalantly bask in the waves of cheers from an adoring crowd and well Koufax was Koufax for chrissakes!
Fast forward to an aging man who has come under the dark force of the cult like SABR organization.
Now I am not so sure that the stolen base is all that.
The thing is, there is a disconnect between what has been studied and what I have seen. For example, we read about the limited utility of the stolen base and its effect on run scoring. However, to take that as absolute gospel is to say in effect that Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines would have been superior players (or at the very least, no less valuable) had they consistently stayed on first base whenever they got on. LINK
2 comments Last one added about 1 year ago — Leave a Comment
Steve Hartline about 1 year ago
I tend to agree. Rather than discuss the mathematical lack of value of the stolen base, I'd like to weigh in on what I recall happening with the speedsters on base whe more players did steal.
In my day, Whitey ball was in full swing, and the Cardinals in the 1980s were winning 1 run games at an unheard of clip. During part of that era, Vince Coleman was in the midst of redefining the art of base stealing. What Coleman would do, if he could get on base (his OBP was pretty paltry for a lead-off hitter), was so disrupt the natural flow of the game that he would either steal, or it seemed (again, this is what I recall, and the memory can fade) that the threat of his stealing would distract the pitcher's concentration on the batter. After a half dozen tosses over to first, the pitch would sail across home plate dead center and belt high and get lined into the outfield. It certainly seemed to me that the risk was worth the reward.
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Landis Marks about 1 year ago
I am doing some research on that topic. i will publish something in the next day or so,
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