Baseball Steals Analysis

Baseball Stealing Bases Analysis

Many times throughout my life I have heard some variation of the phrase "When stealing bases the runner needs to be successful XX% of the time to be beneficial to their team." The specific number that was given ranged from 50% all the way up to 95%, but what stayed the same every time was that no source for that specific number, and the statistic never took into co consideration the current situation. Even as a child that never quite sat right with me, so in this project i will get to the bottom of it and figure out how successful at stealing bases a runner needs to be in order to make it worth the risk.

I will accomplish this task by using the expected number of runs scored based on the position of the runners and the number of outs from Baseball Prospectus and doing statistical analysis to find the success rate that makes the expected number of runs if the runner attempts to steal greater than or equal to the expected number of runs if they play it safe and stay put.