Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

I was just looking at cards and noticed Larry Gardner 1920 had 3 stolen bases and was caught 20 times.
Apparently that was before analytics.

"They've got me 10 times in a row, I just KNOW I can make it this time!".

He is "due."

That is an iconic line in ATG. Larry Gardner is one of the most old-school cards I never really considered too much. Plus, can't teach baseball IQ

Could be that that team did lots of hit and run and Larry got caught in the run down by the batter hitting ground balls to the infield....

MtheB wrote:Could be that that team did lots of hit and run and Larry got caught in the run down by the batter hitting ground balls to the infield....

More like a H&R swing and a miss results in a caught stealing?
Batted ball in play can result in a lot of different ways to make an out, but CS isn't one of them.

Did you mean to say this in a different way, or am I reading it wrong?

Interesting observation re hit-and-run fails. PS a lot of Dead Ball triples in the bigger ballparks were slow runners thrown out at home (where faster guys might have had inside-the-park homers).

Baseball didn't consistently start recording caught stealing until 1951. Before that, CS were recorded only sporadically, and 1920 happened to be one of the years when CS was recorded in the AL.

Clearly managers and players didn't worry to much about success rates back in those days. I looked it up, and in 1920, the league total of SB vs CS was 751-701, so a success rate of not much better than 50/50% was considered acceptable. The contemporary view is that a 67% success rate is needed to make SB pay off. Some of these CS were likely on failed H&R attempts, but then that also raises questions about the value of the H&R--when the runner has to steal whether he gets a good jump or not. Of course, the whole question of steals and H&R must have looked very different in an era before HR became common, but it's kinda interesting to note that this style was then known as scientific baseball.

Anyway, Gardner was clearly on the wrong end of the SB scale in any era, but still, his results might not have seemed extremely notable in his team's context.

That team, the 1920 Cleveland Indians, had an overall base stealing record of 73-93. And Gardner wasn't the only one with a negative steal rate. Wambsganss went 9-18 and Jamieson 2-9. The great Tris Speaker, the team's manager, was 10-13.

Still, Cleveland somehow overcame its negative steal rate. They won the pennant with 98 wins as part of a dramatic three team race with the White Sox (who would soon to be branded the Black Sox) and Babe Ruth's Yankees--in the Babe's first year as a Yank. Then Cleveland won the World Series over Brooklyn, despite posting a steal rate of 2-6. At least Gardner didn't make a steal attempt in the WS.

I was thinking about the Batter Misses Pitch H&R scenario.
The entire 1920 Indians team only struck out 379 times so they were good contact hitters. If the H&R was called, they probably didn't miss a lot of pitches around the strike zone.
Base stealing percentage would normally increase if the catcher had to dig an unhittable ball out of the dirt.

The most reasonable explanation is that teams would pitch out more to get an easy out at second when the hit and run was called.

It would have been interesting to watch a game from the dead ball era. The strategy was probably a lot different that what we see today.