Base Stealing Viability

I've noticed that nearly every team in every league I'm playing in has catchers with strong arms. I also see a lot of teams with pretty rough looking stolen base success rates. Do you feel catcher arms are too cheap? I often set my base stealing to conservative to avoid getting caught way too often. For reference, I only play 80M DH.

If anything catcher arms are overpriced. Poor catcher arms induce more steal attempts but the success rates aren't much different. My catcher defense tends toward atrocious at low caps.

If they're overpriced, why is almost everyone using those cards? I'd say in all my leagues there is a max of about 1-2 catchers with a bad arm and most of them are -3 or better. Bengie Molina is 1 rated with a -3 arm for 500k.

I was going to post the same thing as Max. Personally, I don't have the courage to use John Tamargo, John Henry, or Carl Sawatski as my primary catcher, but the folks who swear by the Sabermetrics clearly do. Note, these are the folks who are in the Barnstormers finals year after year.

Very interesting, guys. I have used John Henry and was quite excited to try him. He did give up a lot of stolen bases but other than that, he was great. What do you consider to be a worthy stolen base percentage for a team? From what I'm seeing so far, and I am going on memory, a lot of teams are well under 80%. I am often tempted by Wagner but when I look at the league and just about everyone has a -2 or better arm I usually end up dropping such players. Am I making a mistake? Also, if my opponent has -3 to -5 arm (battery) I set base stealing to conservative or extra conservative, depending on the team.

Pitcher hold ratings can eclipse catcher arms, so success in SBs might be easier than it seems, especially if people use RPs with poor hold. I can usually pull around 70-75% in SBs on typical teams by limiting any aggressive stealing to AA or AAA stealers. Even so, check their splits. An AA/AAA who’s got splits of, say, 17-15 is gonna get nailed a lot more than a 20-16. Even so, it’s reasonable to run conservative SB if your main strategy is not built around them. For a team built around it, I’d take my lumps and go for volume. If I get 300 SBs and, say, 125 caught, I’m still +175 bases up, not counting bad throws by the catcher. Part and parcel, since a running team is all about forcing the issue. Yeah, you’re gonna run yourself out of a game or 2. But you’re gonna the opposite about the same amount, I’ll wager, making that aspect a wash.

Anything between 70%-80% is basically a wash, and even John Henry doesn't usually give up 80%.

But Bengie Molina is indeed great value. I guess it's less that good arms are overpriced and more that bad arms are underpriced.

My concern is whether base stealing is a viable and worthwhile expenditure. If even John Henry is capable of nullifying the advantage of base stealing, what's the point? The way I view card balance, generally, is that a player good at a single thing (like Molina's excellent defense) can still be inexpensive, but each additional edge the card has (and its magnitude) causes the price to inflate quickly. Having said that, it seems counterintuitive to give such strong defense away essentially for free, as we're required to field a 24 man team and Molina costs the minimum. Regardless of whether the card is balanced or not, it does reveal Strat's methodology for card price evaluation, to an extent.

Another potential area of concern I see is the base stealing managerial settings we have at our disposal. We can set a player to steal more or don't steal, and we can tweak the general aggressiveness of our base stealing as a team. Due to the ambiguity of the settings and the wide variation of opposition, it seems like a recipe for suboptimal stealing ratios. I tweak my settings every night but I suspect most managers don't, as it is tedious. Thus, it makes sense that a lot of teams steal poorly. Personally, I would appreciate more clarity on the controls and perhaps more granularity, such as 7 stealing settings instead of 5.

Lastly, I am looking back at several of my completed teams and I see that even people like Lou Brock can potentially have a 66% success rate. As I said, I do tweak my settings each night and if the arms look unfavorable I will set to conservative. I even set to very conservative at times. It could be seen as just a bad season for a single player on a team, but from what I'm seeing since my return, poor stealing ratios seem very common. Am I wrong?

You shouldn't need to change the settings depending on nightly hold/arm ratings. Say "Normal" means attempt to steal 2nd when safe chance is 75% or greater. "Aggressive" lowers that to 70%. "Conservative" raises it to 80%. I'm pulling these figures out of thin air but you get the idea. The setting should respond to the safe%, not just keep attempts constant with no regard for safe%.

And just because Henry can mostly nullify SB value in the aggregate doesn't mean there are no individual players who can create value via SBs.

The settings ideally would work something like that although I bet if you look at some of your leagues you will notice a lot of very poor steal ratios. To the point where I wonder if the vast majority of players should be set to don't steal. The 20/16 guys are of course the best but even they are capable of putting up some terrible numbers. I believe this is often due to manager settings being set to aggressive or very aggressive, or simply being left on normal for the entire season.

All I'm saying is I think this area of the game needs some improvements. The best stealers in the game (a small and elite group) should be putting up better numbers than they are. I believe the settings need work and that catcher arms are too inexpensive. A good indication of this is nearly every manager using catchers with good arms or strong meta picks as the few exceptions.