Stolen Bases Against

A stat we should have started keeping a long time ago

Stolen Bases Against

As promised, this is the first of what should be a long series looking at the work of Bill James.

The 1977 Bill James Baseball Abstract is almost impossible to find. Your best bet is to spend hundreds of dollars on an eBay auction - and that’s what the reprints go for. The originals, which are certainly fading, are the territory of only the most hardcore collectors.

Of course, the newsletters themselves don’t really matter. It’s the content that we care about.

Thanks to a now 20 year old blog post over at Baseball Analysts, we can at least get an idea of what James was talking about:

Okay — there are two basic points here:

1. Stolen base against stats for catchers and pitchers were not kept at that time; and

2. James came up with an interesting way of approximating those stats.

First of all — it’s crazy to me that nobody thought of keeping track of the number of times a catcher threw out a would-be base stealer. You’d think that this would be one of the first fielding stats we’d keep for catchers. Nope.

If you look at The 1977 Sporting News Baseball Guide, you’ll notice that there are no caught stealing statistics for catchers at all:

You could technically infer the caught stealing statistics from the catcher assist totals, thoug it’s only going to get you so far.

Now, it’s well known that James started compiling his statistics by carefully going over boxscores printed in The Sporting News — like this one from July 1976:

That Ball Park Baseball ad is fitting, by the way: James was an avid player of the game.

You’ll notice, though, that caught stealing wasn’t listed anywhere in these boxscores. That’s right: in 1976, nobody paid enough attention to figure out how many times players were caught stealing.

Take a look at the Pirates at Braves game on June 13, for example. The Boxscore notes that Ken Henderson of Atlanta stole a base. What it doesn’t tell us, however, is that pitcher Phil Niekro was caught stealing second base.

We know that he was because we happen to have a complete play by play account of that game on Baseball Reference:

I’m guessing that Niekro was probably caught with a big lead and probably tried to advance to second. Actually, guessing is about the best that we can do, since the only report I could find of the play was a vague side note at the bottom of the article in the next day’s Atlanta Journal:

That’s the sort of thing that Bill James was dealing with. Nobody paid any attention to caught stealing at all. They didn’t show up anywhere — not even in the boxscores printed by the local newspapers:

So what did James do? He counted the one thing he could count: the number of stolen bases each catcher allowed. He then divided that number by the number of games the catcher appeared in, and rank ordered the catchers, looking for the ones that gave up the lowest number of stolen bases per game.

His conclusion was that Steve Year, Johnny Bench, Gary Carter, and Bob Boone were the four best defensive catchers in baseball in 1976.

It’s a pretty ingenious approach to the problem — especially given how underappreciated catcher fielding apparently was at the time.

Interestingly enough, this is kind of at odds with the reconstructed statistics we have on Baseball Reference. Here are the 1976 Major League leaders in caught stealing among catchers:

Among players with over 100 starts, Ted Simmons, Johnny Bench, Jim Sundberg, and Steve Yeager make the top four, with Bob Boone nowhere to be found. Notably, James’ estimation didn’t tell us much about Gary Carter, who, as we now know, what actually a very good defensive catcher.

It’s also interesting to note that James seems to have underrated Jim Sundberg, who winds up the leading catcher in terms of Total Fielding Runs Above Average per Baseball Reference:

However, I should note that James was close with Bench, Yeager, and Dempsey. Again, Bob Boone is far below the players on this list.

By the way — Total Zone on Fangraphs gives us a very similar list:

We’ll get into the differences between these more advanced statistics later.

Anyway - that gives you an idea of the sort of thing Bill James was tinkering around with in the early years. It’s an interesting way to approach a problem that really should have been easier to understand.

I guess it goes to show that we only measure the things we really care about. Fortunately, we now understand enough about the game of baseball to know that catching a would-be basestealer is a pretty significant thing.