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JAttractive - you have it right, but I want to stress that in other eras the steal was a valuable thing. When runs are at a premium, and extra-base hits are rare (say in the 1900s and 1910s) one-run strategies become more important. The correlation between steals and runs scored was much higher in the deadball era. Today there's almost no correlation - bad, low-scoring teams steal with at least as much frequency as high-scoring teams. But that's not always been the case.
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