Quote:
Originally Posted by Dyzalot
I'm pretty sure that sabremetricians would be pretty happy with how often and how successfully the Red Sox stole bases last year. I don't think they rule all of those things out completely. It is just that they've shown the value of those strategies to be far less or far more situational than conventional baseball wisdom had assumed.
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Exactly! I think the upshot is that a successful stolen base is a definite plus in enhancing a team's scoring chances. A caught stealing: well, obviously a minus. So it's not the stealing of bases that the advanced metrics folk really frown upon. It's just that mathematical models show that a certain success rate is needed for this to be probabilistically wise. The general rule, as I understand it, is that a player needs to have something approaching an 80% success rate for him to be providing value to his team in attempting to steal bases.
(Now me, as a fan, well, I love the stolen base. And sometimes I say wisdom be damned. But I get their point and I can't find fault with the rationality of their arguments. Few people who know me have ever accused me of being rational to a fault.
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