Collette Calls: Get a Jump on Steals

We will finally have actual spring training games this week! It feels so good to type that sentence because it means the best time of the year is here — the peak of draft season. I have already had two in-person drafts for this season; the first was the XFL draft back at First Pitch Arizona in November, while the most recent one was the Waffle House Area Roto Fantasy (WHARF) league this past weekend in the metro Atlanta area. Did I plan on opening up with two first baseman? No. But, I believe I made it work in the end. Before I forget, if you would like to take me on head-to-head in a RotoWire Online Championship league this season, there are still spots left for the draft which is scheduled for the evening of February 27th. 

As spring training begins, these are the top 10 things I look for while I peruse the box scores and our news bits:

1. Injuries
2. Injuries
3. Injuries
4. Injuries
5. Injuries
6. Team stolen base attempts
7. New pitches
8. New positions
9. Playing time
10. Roster cuts

I joined Erik Halterman on the RotoWire Fantasy Baseball podcast recently to look at some of the bold predictions:

If you listened to the entire episode, you heard me utter a phrase numerous times: "History is a great teacher." I love that phrase, perhaps because history was my favorite subject in school and because the best teacher I ever had was my Contemporary History teacher in my senior year of high school. It is contemporary history that I wish to revisit here, as we once again look to plan how best to tackle the stolen base market in the third year of the new rules regarding steals. 

The league stole 3,617 bases last season, besting its total of 3,503 steals from the 2023 season. We knew the league was going to attempt more steals in 2023 under the new rule changes, but there was some uncertainty about whether baserunners would take things further or if the pitcher and catcher batteries would adjust the machinations of their roles to reduce the 80 percent success rate teams enjoyed in 2023. What if I told you the answer was under our collective noses in March of 2024?

March of 2023 saw the league use spring training as a test lab to see how steals would play out, as managers sent their players early and often. The Giants led all clubs with 55 attempted steals in spring training but then only attempted 73 steals as a club during the entire regular season. The correlation between attempted steals per game in Spring Training and the final league-wide regular season total is a robust 0.82.

This theory doesn't work as well at a team level, as the table below shows the teams sorted in descending order of regular season stolen base attempts and how those teams ranked during spring training. The top four spot held up, but things get sloppy thereafter:

The correlation here is weaker at 0.50, because teams like the Yankees, Rockies and Giants failed to bring their aggressive spring tendencies north with them, while the middle of the pack tended to slow down as well. 

I cannot overstate the importance of paying attention to the running game in Spring Training. The research I did after the 2023 season found that we can use that data to closely project the final league-wide stolen base rate. The data before the rule change allowed us to see that despite some year to year changes, the data held up from 2010-2022. The rule changes in 2023 gave us a new baseline to work with, but using the same formula with the 2023 spring training rate, the projection was off by less than one percent. Now that we have two seasons of data under the current rules, I would suggest that the formula needs to be adjusted to the last two springs specifically. 

Had someone taken the 2.25 steals per game rate from the 2024 spring training games and applied a 17 percent reduction to that total for the regular season, it would have projected to 4,536 attempted steals in the 2024 regular season. That would have represented a 3.8 percent increase in the steals attempted during the 2023 regular season. The final 2024 number was slightly higher at 4,578, but that was only 0.9 percent higher than the projected total. If we apply the same formula to a potential 2025 Spring Training stolen base attempt rate between 2.20 and 2.35, we get the math in the table below:

Since we are coming off a season where the power numbers were depressed, I believe it's safe to assume the league will be running at least as often as it was last season, if not more often, until the baseball begins to fly a bit further.  A review of the publicly available projection systems are averaging a 3.0 percent projected increase in steals this season, so if we see a spring training per-game rate below 2.32, adjust accordingly. 

I know this is more math and numbers than you're accustomed to in my columns, but I cannot overstate how much we can learn about how the regular steals season market will play out by paying attention to what happens in spring training. History is indeed a great teacher.