Forget the home run. Baseballs’ golden age for stolen bases is now
Part of Dino Ebel’s job, with the Dodgers now and with the Angels for 13 seasons prior, is to mind the basepaths. Which baserunners have a green light to steal second base? Which pitchers have a good pickoff move and a short stride to home plate? Which catchers have the best pop times? A major league infield coach like Ebel trafficks in this data daily.
Yet even he was stumped when I quizzed him about which National League team is threatening to break the all-time record for base stealing. Not stolen bases – stolen-base efficiency, the art of stealing without getting caught, the clear purpose of this enterprise in 2019.
“Is it us?” he asked.
No. Close.
According to Baseball Reference, which publishes caught stealing data for every season since 1920, the Arizona Diamondbacks are successfully stealing bases at a rate of 86.74 percent. If they steal 10 more bases without getting caught – difficult but not impossible in their final 10 games – they will have surpassed the 2007 Phillies’ record of 87.9 steals per 100 attempts. With home run records falling on the team- and league-wide levels daily, the D-backs are chugging away at the record you never knew existed.
Forget the home run. We’re in a golden age of base stealing, just not one that calls to mind Rickey Henderson, Tim Raines, Vince Coleman and their celebrated peers of the 1980s and 1990s. Rank every season since 1920 by league-wide stolen base efficiency, and you’ll find each of the last 13 seasons among the top 14 all-time.
When Henderson stole a single-season record 130 bases in 1982, he was caught stealing for the 10th time on May 21 of that season (and 42 times in all). No one had been caught stealing 10 times this season until Sept. 6, when Bryan Holaday threw out Whit Merrifield trying to poach second base. Ebel’s Dodgers have only been caught stealing nine times as a team in 60 attempts in 2019. That’s an 85 percent success rate, currently fifth all-time.
There’s a fantastic reason to appreciate this golden age for what it is – more on that shortly – but let’s first acknowledge why it’s so difficult. The stolen base is an exciting play. The caught stealing is an exciting play. Baseball needs more exciting plays. The home run, for all its glory, is followed by an average of 22 seconds of trotting around the basepaths, and no other action on the field of play. Multiply that by a record 6,308 dingers (and counting, through Tuesday), and you have 38 hours, 32 minutes and 56 seconds of dead time in a season. A stolen base attempt is the home run’s spiritual opposite.
Yet what makes for an exciting play doesn’t always make for good strategy. The sabermetric dicta that rule the major-league game scorned outs on the bases long before this was fashionable in practice. Now, teams can precisely calculate the time it takes each pitcher to deliver the ball to home plate, and the time it takes each catcher to receive a pitch and release a throw to second or third – his “pop time,” in the baseball parlance. Every runner is an expert at calculating his odds of a successful stolen base.
Ebel believes it is this combination – more information, and a better idea of how to apply it – that has turned the last decade into a golden age for base stealing.
“I really believe that situation of game plays a big part of it: early in a game, two outs, time’s on your side, then with all the information we’re getting from upstairs, put ‘em all together, mix it in, who’s the baserunner, who’s the batter, scoreboard dictates it, putting it in, when’s a good time to run? I think that’s all being calculated in,” Ebel said.
The unofficial godfather of this base-stealing worldview is Davey Lopes. His playing career (1972-87) overlapped with much of Henderson’s. Yet unlike Henderson, Lopes prized efficiency over volume. He was caught stealing on fewer than 17 percent of his attempts, currently the 26th-best mark of all time. Lopes preached this gospel among every team he coached – the Orioles, Padres, Nationals, Phillies and Dodgers.
It is not by coincidence that the first-base coach of the most efficient base-stealing team of all-time, those ’07 Phillies, was Lopes himself.
“He was very good at knowing different situations, reading the pitcher, doing his homework on when we would go,” said Chase Utley, the Phillies’ second baseman. “He would always encourage us, especially at certain moments in a game, to try to steal a base.”
There’s a temptation in 2019 to dismiss caught stealing stats as the relic of a 1920s box score. It’s at least a poor proxy for baserunning skill, something Lopes was always quick to distinguish from base-stealing skill.
FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus offer their own holistic baserunning metrics, applicable at the individual and team levels. Run down the list of both websites’ best baserunning teams in history, and you’ll quickly encounter a bunch of bad clubs. Per FanGraphs, the best baserunning team since the 1915 dissolution of the Federal League is the 2010 Tampa Bay Rays. They won 96 games in the regular season, then lost a five-game Division Series. They were a good team. The second team on this list, the 68-win San Diego Padres of 2016, were not a good team.
Baseball Prospectus’ data reaches back to 1950. Their all-time baserunning leader is the 1965 St. Louis Cardinals, an 80-win team. The loose relationship between baserunning and winning shouldn’t belittle the individual metrics. Rather, it suggests that baserunning is less integral to team success than pitching, hitting and defense. It affirms conventional wisdom.
This only amplifies my appreciation for players and teams who have mastered base-stealing efficiency. The 2008 Phillies, who won a World Series with mostly the same lineup as their 2007 forebears, rank sixth all-time in stolen base efficiency. In fact, you’ll find at least one other World Series champion among the top 10, but not a single losing team. The reason is simple but profound: The things that make a team good at stealing bases – athleticism, solid data, and expertise at applying that data – are the same things that make a team good at playing baseball in general. No fancy metrics are needed here. Good old SB% will suffice.
Anecdotally, this is also the rare regular-season skill that translates to the postseason without complication. Some evaluators consider the ability to steal a base even more important in October, when one steal can change the tenor of a game, or a series. You don’t need actual Dave Roberts managing your club to remind you of this, though it probably doesn’t hurt.