Base Stealing Viability

Interesting, so you feel a 50% steal rate is acceptable? I am not knowledgeable on baseball, I just enjoy playing this game (never got to play ball when I was a kid, more than a few times anyway). I like base stealing but all the cannon arms are pretty intimidating, I often just drop some or all of my best stealers as I feel they'll still fail a lot.

When I came back to the game I had forgotten a lot and was tinkering quite a bit with settings. I found setting a 20-16 stealer to Steal More still resulted in a surprisingly high amount of fails. So, if even they can't pull it off, I feel like the setting is suboptimal. Do you agree or have you found a use for it? I also find that using Normal against teams with -4 or -5 arms leads to quite a bit of fails. But perhaps I'm overly risk averse here? What do you consider the bare minimum success rate to be worthwhile? Also, I assume in a pitcher park a higher fail rate is more acceptable as runs are harder to come by.

When I said break-even I meant in terms of value, not literally 50%. Generally a player needs a success rate of 75% to break even, i.e., the runs he gives away by getting caught are cancelled out by the runs he gains from successful steals. But that figure indeed fluctuates in different run environments. I'm content with anything above 70% and my teams don't usually dip below that. I haven't tried the Steal More option but other posters report success with it paired with the Conservative team setting.

Thanks for clarifying. Very interesting idea to use Steal More with Conservative, that had honestly never even occurred to me. I will definitely be exploring that. I'll have to go back and look at a bunch of my teams to see how I want to process. From what I can tell, the best settings are Conservative, Normal, and Aggressive.

I build a lot of speed teams and typically have one of the best SB success rates in the league while at the same time leading the league in SB's.

I set all my good stealers (typically A or better but there are exceptions) to Steal More on the individual settings. My marginal guys to unchecked and the bad guys to Don't Steal. Then I set the team to Conservative. I will usually end up with a success rate between 75%-80% success rate, occasionally better or worse.

In addition, with a team of all 16 or 17 base runners, I always set my team to the Very Aggressive Base Running team setting. You will get tons of extra bases taken without a huge failure rate.

Here's a great example, this team led the league in SB's and % with an exceptional .845:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/st ... son/461228
https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/1691103
https://365.strat-o-matic.com/team/misc/1691103

So the percent risk your players will take is based on your base stealing setting? Aggressive 70%, Normal 75%, Conservative 80%, etc? That's interesting. I don't tweak my settings each night and typically have my base stealing set to Normal. It seems to work fine for me, but trying Conservative could be interesting for a higher success rate.

So the percent risk your players will take is based on your base stealing setting? Aggressive 70%, Normal 75%, Conservative 80%, etc? That's interesting. I don't tweak my settings each night and typically have my base stealing set to Normal. It seems to work fine for me, but trying Conservative could be interesting for a higher success rate.

As you go higher (more aggressive) than conservative, you will see more and more outs stealing including attempts to steal 3rd and Home.