by hechojazz » Tue Nov 15, 2005 12:58 pm
What I do is immediately mark the cards of those hitters with a D or E steal rating "don't steal". Those with particularly good steal ratings get marked "steal more". The others stay unmarked. Then, before each series I check out the opposing pitchers' hold ratings. Together with the opposing catcher's arm rating, I decide whether to set my manager settings to normal or aggressive. Either way, the slow guys won't be running. If the aforementioned hold ratings and catcher's arm aren't too worrisome, I let the rest run a bit more. If the other team looks pretty good at dealing with the run, I haven't seen a normal basestealing setting result in a lot of caught stealings.
Regarding aggressive baserunning, the most important factor is the opposing CF's arm rating. If it is -1 or worse, I generally set my manager settings to aggressive. However, if there's some real guns in RF or LF (or both), I'll scale that back a bit. I just wish you could mark individual player cards to not try to take that extra base, so you could have a bit more control over that as you do with basestealing. My two cents...