Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

Base Stealing settings? how much more trouble will the Max get you into to?

i had 3 guys steal 100+ bases...but did not reach 67% success rate ....82-82...may have just been the guys i had

in the end probably did not work quite the way i had in mind...i am just beginning so i am very experimental

I never push it up past normal unless an obvious advantage (ie +2 starting pitcher and a +3 catcher with a high T-error rate). And in regular season play, if one game of the 3 matchups isn't favorable, or the bullpen has good holds, I probably just leave it at normal at most. I'd say I am typically at conservative 75% of the time.

It is a global increase in steal attempts--including stealing of home, third, less regard for leads etc.
If I am giving away 40% of my baserunners, I better have a very high team OBP with very little power such that I have to take the chances in order to score.

Baserunning is a little different. At least anecdotally, most have observed HAL is calibrated toward more caution. And on a small ball team it is usually too much caution to leave it at normal, depending on the matchups and team speed of course.

The standard sabermetric rule of thumb is that it takes a 67% success rate to break even on base stealing.

Below 67% you're losing runs on steal attempts. Above 67%, you're gaining runs--thought it would take a significant +/- over 67% for the gain or loss to be very significant.

Since steal capabilities vary considerably, I'd suggest that you adjust your steal settings to keep above 67%, or better yet, 70%.

Personally, my teams rarely steal a lot of bases, and base stealing ability is not very important to me in my team design. I regard stealing more as entertainment than an important factor in winning games. For me, base running is a lot more important than base stealing in SOM, in part because it's possible to attain much higher success rates.

Like FrankieT, I rarely go above normal in my team steal setting. I'd rather tweak the settings of individual players. OTOH, my standard base-running setting is Aggressive. I usually manage pretty good success rates at that setting, though this depends of course, on the speed of the players. HAL seems to be rather judicious about deciding when to try to take that extra base.

FrankieT wrote:I never push it up past normal unless an obvious advantage (ie +2 starting pitcher and a +3 catcher with a high T-error rate). And in regular season play, if one game of the 3 matchups isn't favorable, or the bullpen has good holds, I probably just leave it at normal at most. I'd say I am typically at conservative 75% of the time.

It is a global increase in steal attempts--including stealing of home, third, less regard for leads etc.
If I am giving away 40% of my baserunners, I better have a very high team OBP with very little power such that I have to take the chances in order to score.

Baserunning is a little different. At least anecdotally, most have observed HAL is calibrated toward more caution. And on a small ball team it is usually too much caution to leave it at normal, depending on the matchups and team speed of course.

What Frankie said.

I aim for a 70% success rate. I figure that anything below that is costing me too many runs. I never push it past the "normal" setting. My experience has been that when you push it past "normal" your success rate starts diminishing too greatly.

Unless you're trying to set some kind of steals record, never set it for aggressive or very aggressive. It will result in far too many outs trying to steal 3rd & Home.

I build A LOT of base stealing/speed teams and I almost always set the team to conservative and the individual players to Steal More. I routinely will lead the league in stolen bases AND be in the top 1-3 in stolen base % and always well over 70% success rate, often times near 80% success rate.

egvrich wrote:I build A LOT of base stealing/speed teams and I almost always set the team to conservative and the individual players to Steal More. I routinely will lead the league in stolen bases AND be in the top 1-3 in stolen base % and always well over 70% success rate, often times near 80% success rate.

This is a very interesting approach--and one I had never thought of. Thanks!

Have a stolen base team going now, just switched it to conservative....let's see how it goes now

41-37 record at this point using very aggressive....74% success rate

coachprbb wrote:Have a stolen base team going now, just switched it to conservative....let's see how it goes now

41-37 record at this point using very aggressive....74% success rate

Individual settings should be set to Steal More.