One interesting aspect of the Pittsburgh Pirates is manager Derek Shelton’s sudden embrace of the stolen base. In previous years under Shelton, it’s not been an important weapon for the Pirates. During his tenure, the team’s high in stolen bases was 117 in 2023. The highest Shelton’s Pirates have ever ranked in this category was 14th in the major leagues in 2022, when they swiped 89 bags.
Shelton’s Running Pirates
OK, so maybe it doesn’t have quite the same ring as Jerry Tarkanian’s Runnin’ Rebels. Nor is there any resemblance to Chuck Tanner’s Lumber ‘N’ Lightnin’ Gang. This edition of the Pirates is weak on the “lumber” part. That’s a different article.
However, as of Wednesday, the Pirates have stolen 19 bases in seven games, leading all of Major League Baseball. Oneil Cruz leads the way with a major league-leading six steals. Even catcher Joey Bart got into the act. Only two runners have been caught stealing. Five times when a Pirates runner has stolen a base, he’s scored a run. Another time, a runner from third scored when the catcher threw the ball away attempting to nab a base stealer. By my count, three of those 19 steals led directly to runs that wouldn’t have scored otherwise if the inning had been reconstructed without the stolen base. That total isn’t higher because the Pirates have been so pathetic with runners in scoring position. That, too, is a different article.
With his steal in the first inning of today’s game, Oneil Cruz has now successfully stolen 26 consecutive bases dating back to April 28, 2024!
Per: @luke_henne
— Hannah Mears (@mearshannah_) April 2, 2025
Is the Stolen Base Worth the Risk?
One of the main factors in Shelton’s hiring was his hipness to analytics. The original analytics gurus, erstwhile Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane and his assistant, Paul DePodesta, posited that baseball is a game of not making outs. Under their “Moneyball” theory, there’s no such thing as a “productive out,” and stealing a base isn’t worth the risk of making an out on the basepaths. In 2020, four students at the Wharton Moneyball Academy did a study based on data from the 2019 season. There’s a lot of heavy math in their study. Suffice it to say that they found little correlation between a successful stealing percentage and runs scored. They concluded that a stolen base is worth the risk only if the runner is safe at least 70 percent of the time.
Statcast supported that theory in a study of 2024 statistics. According to FanGraphs, “the average successful stolen base event added 0.169 runs to a team’s expected run scoring. The average caught stealing event cost a team 0.394 runs.” When one works out the math, it’s easy to see that a 70 percent success rate is the break-even point, where stolen base attempts neither add to nor subtract from a team’s expected runs:
.169 x .70 = .1183 expected runs gained
.394 x .30 = .1182 expected runs lost
Wait, There’s More
So, the sabermetrics crowd doesn’t dig the stolen base. But there’s a lot more to this, as one might expect. Whether a stolen base should be attempted also comes down to other factors like game situation, who’s at bat, who’s on the mound, who’s behind the plate, the runner’s speed, and the size of his lead.
A better measure of whether a player is contributing by stealing bases is Weighted Stolen Base Runs (wSB), developed by FanGraphs in 2013. It compares “each player’s stolen base runs created per opportunity with league average stolen base runs created per opportunity.” The league average is adjusted to zero. So, a positive number is better than the MLB average, while a negative number is worse..
The Milwaukee Brewers, for instance, were second in MLB last year with 217 steals, six behind the leading Washington Nationals. A deeper dive into the metrics will tell us just how much good these steals did.
In 2024, the Brewers led MLB with 14.4 wSB. The Pirates were 10th with 2.4 wSB. Among individual players, Shohei Ohtani led MLB with 8.8 wSB. (Is there anything that guy doesn’t do better than anyone else?) The Brewers’ Brice Turang was second with 6.3 wSB. Cruz led the Pirates with 3.0 wSB, which tied him with Milwaukee’s Christian Yelich for 15th.
Statcast has its own metrics for evaluating base stealing, Runner Stealing Runs (RSR) and Net Bases Gained (NBG). In 2024, the Brewers led in both these categories with 13 and 68, respectively. The Pirates had zero RSR and minus 17 NBG. (Or would that be 17 Net Bases Lost?) On a player basis, Ohtani led with seven RSR and Elly De La Cruz with 40 NBG. Cruz led the Pirates in both categories, with two RSR and eight NBG.
Why the Pirates Sudden Interest in the Stolen Base?
It probably didn’t escape the notice of the Pirates brass that the Brewers won the National League Central Division last year, and the Pirates didn’t, and the Brewers made extensive use of the stolen base, and the Pirates didn’t. In sports, success breeds copycats. Last October, when general manager Ben Cherington announced that Shelton would be back for a sixth year, after praising Shelton, Cherington said, “Like all of us, certainly, including me, he has targets that he needs to improve on, and I believe he is fully aware of those.” It seemed like an odd thing to say about a five-year manager. One wonders whether an increased use of the stolen base was one of those “targets.”
It’s odd that an organization like the Pirates, which holds itself out as being attuned to the latest metrics, never foresaw how the 2023 rule changes, which included larger bases and limits on pick-off attempts, tilted the field in favor of the stolen base.
They see it now. As of Wednesday, it’s the Pirates leading MLB with 19 steals, 2.4 wSB, one RSR (tied with six other teams), and six NBG (tied with the Boston Red Sox). The Pirates have attempted a stolen base in 3.7 percent of stolen base opportunities, up from .9 percent in 2024. Cruz leads MLB with 1.1 wSB, one RSR (tied with three others), and four NBG.
The Last Word
Of course, none of the above considers the effect the threat of the steal has on the other team. When Tanner came to Pittsburgh in 1977 and brought his running philosophy with him, he was convinced that he was playing a mind game on the opposition. He told Charley Feeney of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “I want the other teams to know that everybody runs on our club. They will talk about us like this: ‘They’re nutty. They run with everybody, even their pitchers.’” His shortstop, Frank Taveras, said to Russ Franke of The Pittsburgh Press, “I think it does bother the pitchers. Maybe not somebody like Jim Kaat, the way he stands there looking right at you with his hands high, but a lot of the other guys, the younger ones.”
In any event, this new running game certainly can’t hurt the Pirates. Their offense has been putrid for five years. At present, the team’s stat line is .197/.291/.278. The odds are against them stringing together three hits in one inning. They lack power. Shelton has to come up with something to generate some scoring and take advantage of Pittsburgh’s good starting pitching.
The post What’s Gotten into the Running Pirates? appeared first on Last Word On Baseball.