You Have to Be Pretty Good to Be Really Bad: Caught Stealing

For every time you get a speeding ticket, you've probably gotten away with it dozens more.

Before we move on to pitching, let’s make a quick stop on base.

Of all the ways to watch your team make an out, running into one on the basepaths is probably the most frustrating. And I’m not just saying that because my first intramural softball season ended with me in the on-deck circle as my roommate tried to stretch a double into a triple—no, I’m not still mad, Evan.

It’s more frustrating cuz, like…you’re already safe, dude. Just don’t do anything silly. Let your teammates drive you home. You trust them, right?

Getting thrown out trying to take an extra base, whether by trying to steal a base or by being overaggressive on a ball in play, hurts your team a lot more than successfully taking the base helps. So if you’re gonna make your money stealing bases, you have to be safe way more than you’re out for it to make sense.

How much more? Well, there’s a term for that: the breakeven point. It’s highly context-dependent, shifting based on the base-out state¹ on a micro scale and the league’s offensive environment on a macro scale. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll just say that it’s usually somewhere around 70%. If you can steal safely more than 70% of the time, you should generally do it.

So, when our good friend Drew Stubbs stole 40 bases in 50 tries in his masterpiece 200-strikeout season, that 80% success rate was excellent. He was a stolen base threat in both volume and efficiency.

I explain the breakeven point first to tip my hand a little. Because it can excuse quite a few blunders as long as you have the successes to back it up.

FanGraphs has a metric simply called “Base Running” (or “BsR” for short), which aims to calculate how many runs a player’s baserunning was worth in a given season relative to league average. These days, the formula includes some more complex calculations on taking extra bases, but that wasn’t tracked until 2002. Prior to that, the only possible metric it could include was stolen base attempts, successful or otherwise.

With that in mind, let’s look at all player-seasons in which the player was caught stealing at least 25 times.

You Have to Be Pretty Good to Get Caught Stealing 25 Times

“Caught stealing” as a stat also wasn’t reliably tracked before the 1950s, so this list is almost certainly incomplete, but out of 19 known occurrences—all of which came before 2002—14 were above-average in BsR. Some of them were outstanding.

Looking at the success rates, you can see why: 12 of these player-seasons were at or above 70%.

When Rickey Henderson was caught stealing an MLB-record 42 times in 1982, he also stole 130 bases, a post-integration MLB record.² Vince Coleman won the 1985 NL Rookie of the Year getting caught 25 times and Lou Brock almost won the 1974 NL MVP getting caught 33 times; each also stole at least 110 bases. All three of these success rates are over 75%, and most of these seasons are like this.

Some of them…aren’t.

Like 1988 Harold Reynolds: 35 steals and 29 times caught, -4.6 BsR…just objectively a horrendous season on the basepaths. But his bat was above league average and his glove was golden, so the Mariners probably weren’t complaining too much. Hitting prowess also explains the Dodgers putting up with Brett Butler’s -3.5-BsR season three years later.

A few of these players couldn’t run or hit. Three of the 19 player-seasons had a below-average wRC+ and a subzero BsR. I’ll go through each of them individually, but I’d first like to point out that they’re all pretty clearly products of their era.

People were stealing a ton of bases in the 1980s.

In the mid-’70s, the league started stealing bases at nearly double its previous rate almost overnight. This unsurprisingly also led to a major uptick in times caught stealing. Steals remained at this inflated rate until the steroid era began in the mid-’90s and the notable increase in power hitting rendered stolen bases less valuable.

All three of the player-seasons that floundered in both hitting and baserunning took place within this period. Getting caught stealing a bunch was just a sign of the times.

Frank Taveras, 1978 Pirates

Frank Taveras was coming off two excellent season on the basepaths. In 1976, he stole 58 bases and was caught just 11 times (84.06% success rate), then in 1977 he stole an MLB-leading 70 bases and was caught 18 times (79.55%). These two seasons earned him the nickname “The Pittsburgh Stealer” and afforded him a few extra mistakes in 1978.

Steve Sax, 1983 Dodgers

Steve Sax, who just barely makes this list with a 99 wRC+, was an All-Star in 1983, thanks in large part to an excellent May in which he slashed .308/.357/.423 with seven stolen bases. He was also the reigning National League Rookie of the Year.

Gerald Young, 1989 Astros

Gerald Young notched almost 2 WAR in 1989 despite awful baserunning and hitting because his defense was excellent. FanGraphs rates his defense as the 20th most valuable in all of baseball that year, just one spot below Harold Reynolds, whose efforts would win him his second of three consecutive Gold Gloves.

So: most players who get caught stealing 25+ times in a season make up for it by stealing a ton of bases successfully. Failing that, they’re usually invaluable to their team at the plate, in the field, or both.

Because, say it with me: you have to be pretty good to be really bad.

You know what’s coming next: the two all-time career leaders in time caught stealing are Rickey Henderson and Lou Brock. Both were successful more than 75% of the time. Both are in the Hall of Fame.

Chapter 1: Strikeouts
Chapter 2: Double plays
Chapter 3: Caught stealing(s?)
Chapter 4: Walks
Chapter 5: Hits

1. The “base-out state”, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, refers to the combined information of which bases are occupied and how many outs have been made in the inning. Examples of a base-out state are “2 outs, runner on 1st” (this is a good time to steal) and “1 out, runners on 1st and 3rd” (this is usually a bad time to steal). There are 24 possible base-out states.

2. Hugh Nicol stole 138 bases for the 1887 Cincinnati Red Stockings. He was one of five players to steal at least 100 bases that season, along with Arlie Latham of the St. Louis Cardinals (129), Charles Comiskey (yes, that Charles Comiskey) of the St. Louis Cardinals (117), John Montgomery Ward (look him up) of the New York Giants (111), and Jim Fogarty of the Philadelphia Phillies (102). I wonder how many of them would have ended up on this list if “caught stealing” was tracked at the time.