The Basepaths

In Sunday's Chicago Tribune, Bob Foltman writes an interesting piece on the White Sox' basestealing prowess and approach to baserunning in the upcoming season. Foltman discusses the club's high stolen base totals from the 90s and suggests that the club will need a large improvement from last season to represent a strong running team. I found the article highly disturbing due to the fact that at no point in the entire piece is the concept of stolen base success rate addressed. In fact the closest the article comes to discussing outs on the basepaths is this nauseating passage:

Guillen wants his runners to be aggressive going from first to third on hits, and if that means they sometimes run the team out of innings, so be it.

"That's fine with me because if you're afraid to make a mistake running the bases, you're not going to be aggressive enough," Guillen said. "I'll take the chance because in the long run, we'll have the [last] laugh."

Rest assured, if the Sox run wild on the basepaths and find themselves running into outs 40% of the time, Ozzie Guillen will not be laughing this season unless the club benefits from a number of huge breaks to compensate for the baserunning blunders. For some time now, it has been well accepted in the sabermetric community that for a stolen base to increase a team's chance of scoring runs, a player must be successful roughly 75% of the time. Fans subscribing to more traditional baseball knowledge tend to scoff at this assertion for reasons I've never been able to completely understand. Even children in little league understand the concept that being thrown out on the basepaths costs the team scarce opportunities to score runs. Everyone should be able to agree that there is a point at which a player is caught stealing too frequently to render his stolen bases valuable. For those who consider the 75% figure to be arbitrary, Joe Sheehan wrote an outstanding article for Baseball Prospectus about a year ago that demonstrates the strength of the calculations based on run expectation and dispels the common misconception that intangibles such as distracting the pitcher are not accounted for in the calculations.

Now, with the help of the always wonderful Baseball-Reference.com let's take a look at the Sox' potential to generate runs on the basepaths in 2005 compared to the teams of the 90s:

Year	SB	CS	Success Rate
1990	140	90	60.9 %
1991	134	74	64.4 %
1992	160	57	73.7 %
1993	106	57	65.0 %
1994	77	27	74.0 %
1995	110	39	73.8 %
1996	105	41	71.9 %
1997	106	52	67.1 %
1998	127	46	73.4 %
1999	110	50	68.8 %
2000	119	42	73.9 %
2001	123	59	67.6 %
2002	75	31	70.8 %
2003	77	29	72.6 %
2004	78	51	60.5 %

A few things stand out from table. First of all, despite Foltman's praise for the baserunning ability of the Sox clubs in the 90s, none of those teams scored substantially more runs through the act of stealing bases. While the clubs with success rates above 70 % certainly were not killing the team on the basepaths, the rate still falls below the 75 % break even point. As far as the current club's prognosis, while we have only the admittedly small sample size of one season, it appears Ozzie Guillen's aggressive approach towards baserunning is hurting the Sox' ability to score runs. The table suggests that Guillen inherited a power laden team with few stellar baserunners and encouraged them to run wild in 2004. While the team's number of stolen bases remained virtually the same as the past two seasons, the number of attempts increased, leading the club's success rate to plummet more than ten percentage points. Perhaps such a decrease should not come as a shock for a team managed by a man with a putrid 61 % success rate during his playing career.

The optimistic outlook on the Sox' ability to steal bases this season states that Guillen now has the proper personnel to fit into his baserunning philosophy and the team will therefore be more successful on the basepaths. Scott Podsednik is a good place to start. While Podsednik does have a number of flaws in his game, stealing bases is most certainly not one of them as Pods had 70 thefts last season and sports a stellar success rate of 83.1 % (!) over his career. Tad Iguchi figures to be another plus on the basepaths with a career success rate of 77.9 % in Japan. However, it does remain to be seen though how Iguchi's basestealing prowess in Japan will translate to the majors and Iguchi will be taking playing time away from speedster Willie Harris (19 SB in 2004, 81.3 % career success rate). Additionally, offseason acquisitions Jermaine Dye (23 career stolen bases) and A.J. Pierzynski (6 career stolen bases) do not represent upgrades on the basepaths. Ultimately, the best case scenario in 2005 is that Podsednik and Iguchi will perform to the best of their abilities and Guillen will lay off the green light. The former is a distinct possibility. I for one would not count on the latter.