Tyler Greene could be one of the best base-stealers in the recent history of baseball

Hard to say, but it seems Tony knows what Tyler is really good at.

my bad.

Because it’s lots and lots of free bases. But the thing is, there are two possible outcomes with a stolen base attempt. An extra base, or an unnecessarily-created out. The out hurts you a lot more than the extra base helps you, so you have to have a really high success rate in order for your base-stealing to be a net positive for the team. It’s not quite black and white (stealing is good or stealing is bad) it all depends on the details.

Ergo, anyone good at the first, who doesn’t do the second, is going to be highly rated by both the moneyball and the whiteyball crowd. I guess perhaps the thing that the whiteyballers maybe don’t put enough emphasis on is success rate – stealing 40 bases in a season is not helping your team if you’re also getting caught 25 times, but stealing 30-some bases and only getting caught 3 or 4 times (as I suspect Greene could if he was given a full-time role ) is pretty big news.

I’m not arguing for or against Greene – I’ve always been slightly ambivalent about him. But he is an excellent (and, outside of St Louis, hugely under-rated) baserunner.

as far as player value goes, it’s about 40% OBP, 30% Power, 25% Defense, and 5% Baserunning. It is also much easier to provide negative value on the bases than it is to provide positive value, and the players with the highest baserunning scores are the ones with extremely large negative values.

Is stealing bases sometimes good? Yes. Is stealing bases ever something that should be prioritized over any other baseball skills like power, patience, or defense? No.

Just look at the points made in this post: Tyler Greene may be one of the best base-stealers ever, yet he can’t hold a major-league job. Certainly some fault for that goes to the manager that insists on playing a player with no baseball skills rather than a player with a few fringy ones, but the fact is that even very mediocre players are able to stick on the roster if the skill they bring is a highly important one.

He’s 16 for 16, so that’s 100%.

The impossible is possible!

It’s also really valuable to have a guy who can swipe second and third (which, with a RHB in the box, is actually the easier base to steal, imo*) when your baseball team is as power constrained as those Whiteyball teams were. You can create a lot of runs without hits in those instances, although it would be best if that guy could also walk and put the ball in play. Coleman hit a lot of IFFB if I remember correctly — I always remember listening to Jack on the radio lament the fact that a “guy that fast should be hitting the ball on the ground”.

FWIW — his ‘87 season is probably as valuable as any a basestealer has ever had, based purely on stolen base value. Had baserunning WAR existed starting in 1975, I would guess it would add 25-30 wins to Rickey Henderson’s career total of 114, putting him in some pretty elite company.

and he had some TRULY elite running seasons too (like 87). I was merely pointing out (perhaps awkwardly) that 81 SB would be a pretty astonishing number in the modern game, but that (due to the CS) it probably isn’t any more valuable than (say) Ichiro’s 45 SB from 47 attempts (in fact it’s quite possibly less so).

the break-even point would be far higher (say 95% or greater) because of the limited number of outs. You really don’t want to run at all in late game situations unless you’re nearly 100% sure that you’re going to be safe. Better to play the percentages, bunt the runner over and hope that you can get a base hit before accumulating one or two more outs.

.250/.320/.380 is well within his capabilities, I think. Also tend to agree that he probably doesn’t get a chance in StL. I think Ryan Jackson might overtake him by the middle of next year anyhow. But I’d have liked to have seen him given a chance – you also have to feel sorry he’s not been given more than 300-odd MLB PAs because he’s probably only got a couple more years to make an impact before he starts to be getting too old.

But I’m not telling you.

He’s a guy with a lot of useful skills, but not ones that coalesce together. He can hit it hard, but he struggles to make contact. He’s great on the basepaths, but he doesn’t get on base enough. His defensive skills are good, but he sometimes struggles with concentration and making routine plays. I guess he’s potentially a good player, but quite a frustrating one.