Worst SB/CS ratio you have ever seen?

[dward1]

Just noticed this guy has a career 73 steal, 197 CS ratio for a 27% success rate. at 35, he is finally on track to have his first positive year ever after going 4-23 the past two years. incredible he just keeps trying

[The Game]

And here I thought 25 SB 21 CS was bad.

[rpriske]

I once had a guy playing in 1901 who had running ratings of around 17 or 18 out of 20 on both sides, get caught the first TWENTY times he tried to steal before I made him stop running.

He was pretty unique. I figured my scouts were just wrong about his abilities.

[Syd Thrift]

Will Clark was 5 for 22 in real life 1987 and there are several Cleveland Indians players from the 1970s with really bad season-to-season totals. If memory serves, the Indians' deal was that they ran the hit and run a lot and, well, that results in CSes. Not sure what Will Clark's deal was, although ISTR it getting talked about in the Great American Baseball Stat Book that year...

So FWIW I'm doing a fictional deadball era league that's now in the year 1910 and although league totals are right there (actually, I raised the steal percentages to modern-ish levels because when you don't do that you get this weird alternative universe in which the fastest players in the league are somehow less valuable than the slowest because if you steal 50 bases and get caught 40% of the time you're actually costing your team runs, and then lowered the steal rates so that SBs don't go crazy) (but the point is, the leaguewide rates and percentages are exactly what I expect them to be), individuals are... weird. Some guys have, like, 60 steals with 5 caughts and others have 25 with 20 CS.

Anyway, while I am on this rant, I kind of would like to see this stuff, or maybe just WAR or whatever, get adjusted a bit. Fast players are at a bit of a premium in old timey baseball because fast players, at least at the time, would have forced more errors. I don't know that there's any proof of this and it's not really something you see in the modern game quite as much (Ichiro seemed to force a lot of them) but it absolutely happens at lower levels of the game, so why not? A great runner sprinting to first will make a third baseman rush his throw, resulting in more errors. A guy stealing second will require the catcher to throw him out, resulting in more errors than if he just stayed put. A guy taking extra bases on hits will also require throws, resulting in more errors, and so on and so forth.

This isn't *that* big of a deal in today's game but consider that error rates in 1910 were nearly 3 times as high as they are now. That plus the fact that there were so many more balls in play meant that teams committed on average close to 2 errors per *game* back then. Forcing your opponents to make mistakes would have been a much bigger deal in that environment.