Very Aggressive Baserunning

Did you ever try Very Aggressive Baserunning setting under strategy?

What happens? (Pros and cons).

Another thing I look at every day is the pitcher/catcher combination. My opponent has Pudge, with his monster -5 arm. So in most games, my opponent had a combination of -7 when holding one of my runner at first. Under these circumstances, I set my stealing strategy to very conservative. But again, tonight is different, because Mike Scott has a hold of +7, for a overall combination of +2. So if Dykstra has his lead, he has a 90% chance to steal second. So I will set the stealing strategy back to "aggressive". I am also putting back the "steal more" option that I had removed on Ron Leflore, my most dangerous pinch runner.

Aggressive stealing and steal more will not increase your stealing of 2nd base much but it will increase the attempts on third base and home plate and the number of outs at second. From my studying of this issue aggressive means HAL will go as long is there is a better than 55% chance of being successful. From a run optimization aspect anything less than 70% is costing you runs over the long term. There are only 3 settings for stealing I utilize, Very Conservative, Conservative and normal.

Here are two teams that both had stealing teams in a league, the first one I think had stealing set to normal and resulted in 68% success and contributed to the poor record, was an interesting team in that was 51-30 at home the exact same as my team but a total disaster on the road. My team was set to very conservative all year and ended with 84% success and second in the league in steals anyway. What you would want is for Dykstra to steal if he has the lead, conservative steal will do that more often than not and he will go, what he will not go is go the second time without a check no matter what, which will happen with aggressive, along with stealing third and home more often.
http://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1437283
http://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1437289

The raiders with their success ratio had 50 more outs than me on the base paths. In general on my teams I aim for a 75-80 percent success rate. The catcher's and pitcher's ability are automatically accounted for in using conservative, it is the success rate that changes.

Thanks. Great information on stealing.

I'm wondering more here about very Aggressive Baserunning...not stealing.

Does very Aggressive Baserunning setting mean my players will all be trying to turn singles into doubles...and doubles into triples...and triples into home runs constantly...

Or...does very Aggressive Baserunning mean my possible advancing runners on hits and outfield fly balls...they will be trying to come to third and home more...say...1-8 or 1-10 or better?

Oops sorry for the confusion.

I think it applies to both hitters and runners.

I tried to generate some data from a season, but I had to keep daily logs, it was too much effort.

One thing I noticed though is that the success percentage of advancing a base doesn't appear to change much from one team to another, which goes contrary to what you would expect---you would think that pct would be higher with teams adopting a conservative baserunning. The only thing that seems to change is the raw number of attempts, much higher for aggressive team, as you would expect. I also noticed that sometimes, the arm combination that Hal tries to run upon is very low, sometimes 1-5, as if it was a pure random attempt to advance.

I think something along these lines is happening, explaining both the low difference in success percentage and the large difference of attempts under the conservative and the aggressive mode.

From 100 opportunities:
Conservative: threshold at 80%
Easy attempts: 30 attempts at 85%=25 successes, 5 fails.
Hard attempts: 0 attempt
Of the 70 other attempts, 8 random attempts at 50% success=4 successes, 4 fails
Overall conservative: 29 successes, 9 fails, 76%

Aggressive: threshold at 60%
Easy attempts: 30 attempts at 85%=25 successes, 5 fails. (the same attempts that occur in both mode)
Hard attempts: 40 attempts at 70% = 28 successes 12 fails (70% being at half mark btw 60% and 80%)
Of the 30 other attempts, 4 random attempts at 50% success=2 successes, 2 fails
Overall aggressive: 55 successes 19 fails, 74%

76% is better than 74%, but too small to be noticed by a naked eye, especially if you add all the noise. But 74 attempts are clearly more than 38, easily noticed by a naked eye.

The random attempts is something that I suppose must exist: they are moments Hal decides to send the runner no matter what. The success rate is probably low when these random attempts occur--maybe the success rate is a bit higher in the conservative mode---there are more good opportunities under the conservative mode. But still, these random attempts probably affect more the conservative mode because they are more frequent in the conservative mode, and they affect the conservative success percentage much greater than the aggressive success percentage .

While I may have set the thought experiment unfavorably for the conservative mode by setting a success rate of 50% for random attempts, I didn't factor for the fact that sometimes Hal does not throw the ball to harpoon the runner--Hal will prefer reach the cut-off man to stop the hitter to advance. So the percentage success of the aggressive mode is probably much better than seen in this thought experiment. And this affects much more favorably the success rate of the aggressive mode. Bottom line: while I may have a few details wrong in this thought experiment, they all point to the fact that the percentage difference

Great stuff

Two teams in my current ATG league.
My team has slower players than another team.
Not a huge difference, but just overall, his lineup and mine, he has more speed in stealing and in base running.
He has four B base stealers in his starting lineup. I have two.

He is on normal base running setting.
I am on aggressive base running setting.

At 105 games played. He has 215 opportunities 101 advanced 19 outs.
I am at 300 opportunities 99 advanced 32 outs.

So. It seems my setting has created 85 more "opportunities"?
What does THAT mean?

And yet, even with the extra "opportunities" he has basically the same amount of successful advances...with 13 less outs.

So. It would seem, based on this data, without knowing what the heck "opportunities" are...

That ...clearly... normal base running setting is the way to go...

Right???

Opportunities have nothing to do with your settings. Opportunities are mostly related to the number of singles your team produces, if your team plays in a stadium with a high single rating, or if your team has a lot of on-base and good hitters of singles and doubles, you will have much more opportunities than playing in a low-hitting stadium and/or with a low on-base high slugging team.

Your settings affect only the "advaces" and the "outs".

Not sure why your numbers are so different--maybe you play in different divisions and your friend's team have faced many more times outfielders with very bad arms?

I just completed this team.

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/sim/1501042

I had the base running set to very aggressive all season long. 264 advances and 49 outs which I believe comes out to 84.3 success rate. My team was chalk full of high speed guys with several 17's and 16's. Jake Stenzel with a 17 speed was successful 37/38, Charlie Gehringer with his 14 speed was unreasonably bad at 18/29. I think that was an outlier though as Josh GIbson, also 14 speed, was 37/44. Overall though, I think the players running speed is going to have a large impact on the success rate. I think you need to take a close look at that when you're deciding your baserunning aggression.

From my experience though, advancing the extra base on a ball in play seems to have a much higher percentage compared to stealing bases. I liked Marc's comment about reducing the base stealing to very conservative, I think I'm going to try that on my upcoming teams and see if I can reduce the unnecessary attempts to steal 2nd and 3rd. The team I noted above had some pretty good basestealers on it. I had the setting at normal most of the season and they were only successful about 68% of the time. My team advanced nearly twice as many times on balls in play than they did with stolen bases and they did that with 10 less outs. The stolen base in strat seems to be a fools errand.