Stolen base, The

Abstract

The stolen base is an integral part of the game of baseball. As it is frequent that a player is in a situation where he could attempt to steal a base, it is important to determine when he should try to steal in order to obtain more wins per season for his team. I used a sample of games during the 2012 and 2013 Major League Baseball seasons to see how often players stole in given scenarios based on number of outs, pickoff attempts, runs until the end of the inning, left or right-handed batter/pitcher, run differential, and inning. New stolen base strategies were created using the percentage of opportunities attempted and the percentage of successful attempts for each scenario in the sample, a formula introduced by Bill James for batter/pitcher match-up, and run expectancy. After writing a program in R to simulate baseball games with the ability to change the stolen base strategy, I compared new strategies to the current strategy used to see if they would increase each Major League Baseball team's average number of wins per season. I found that when using a strategy where a team steals 80% of the time it increases its run expectancy and 20% of the time that it does not, the average number of wins per season increases for a vast majority of teams over using the current strategy.