Do you steal bases?

 

Stolen bases have long been an important part of baseball. Jackie Robinson stole home in the World Series. Dave Roberts’ stolen base in the 2004 ALCS might be the most unforgettable steal in baseball. Rickey Henderson and Lou Brock are in the top 2 of career stolen bases leaderboard.

We all hear the decline in stolen bases in Major League Baseball. Where have the stolen bases gone? I went to check the baseball reference website and tried to understand a little bit more.

There’s information missed in the very early baseball era, so we use data from 1920.

In 1920, there were more than 3000 stolen-base attempts. However, stealing bases became fewer in 1921, fewer than 2900 attempts. From 1921 to 1972, there were less than 3000 stolen-base attempts each year. In particular, there were even fewer attempts between 1932 and 1961, during this period, we couldn’t even see 2000 attempts in a season. Since 1973, MLB teams had begun to run more and we saw that there were normally more than 4000 stolen-base attempts. Between 1976 and 2002, there were only two seasons, which had fewer than 4000 attempts. These two seasons were 1981 and 1994 and we might still remember what happened in these two years. There were still more than 4000 stolen-base attempts in 2012 and later on, stealing has become less popular. Last season was a shortened one and there were 1177 stolen-base attempts.

Now, let’s look at stolen-base percentage. SB% wasn’t really high in the early baseball era. We can see that, only in 1926 and 1927, SB% was higher than 70%. Normally, stolen-base percentage was below 60% before 1958. Since 1959, MLB teams had had better ideas to steal bases because SB% often went above 60%. Only in 1967, SB% was 59.4%. Since 2004, MLB teams probably have better identified the right way to steal bases, SB% has been above 70% since then. Stolen-base percentage was 75.2% in 2020.  

So, do MLB teams really tend to steal bases less? Let’s see stolen-base attempts per game. It might be easier to understand. From 1920 to 1925, there was at least 1 attempt per game, on average. MLB teams ran less between 1926 and 1973, less than 1 attempt per game. However, running became an important part of baseball games between 1974 and 1999. In these 26 seasons, we can see that it’s normal to have at least one attempt per game. The only exception was in 1998, only 0.98 attempt per game. It’s true that there are fewer stolen bases in modern baseball. Since 2000, we haven’t seen any seasons with at least 1 stolen-base attempt per game. It was only 0.64 attempt in 2019 and it was 0.66 attempt per game last year.
   We all know that it helps a team when a runner advances a base and it’s getting closer to scoring. However, if a runner is caught, that really hurts. Speed is still very important in baseball, but MLB teams are more conservative to let runners try to steal bases. Nonetheless, stealing percentage went above 75% last season. Do MLB teams know how to win a game by attempting to steal wisely?