Why doesn't Mike Trout steal bases any more?

Seems like the value of a stolen base dropped dramatically in the late '90s and early 2000s because of how many home runs were being hit. Now that home run rates are normalizing and scoring overall is down, stolen bases are becoming more valuable again. As someone upthread noted, though, you need to achieve a certain success rate to give them real value.

And Trout can still haul ass. He covers a shitload of territory out in centerfield. I think the dropoff in steals has less to do with his speed than with where he bats in the order and who is hitting behind him. He's expected to drive in runs, not create and score them.

 

It's true that nobody steals anymore. MLB is on pace to have fewer steals per game this year than in any season since 1972, the year before the DH was implemented.

 

In the 70s and early 80s it was often commented favorably upon players if their stolen base percentage was over .500.

In fact, caught stealing totals and SB percentage weren't commonly available stats -- they were semi-secret stuff you had to dig deep into the Sporting News to find.

So guys could go on radio or teevee and rhapsodize about guys who had stolen 35 bases and only been thrown out 33 times, woo hoo!!

It really didn't come out until the mid-late 80s, with the pre-steroids and artificial-turf boom in stolen bases and the coincidental rise of sabremetrics, that it became more or less consensus opinion you need to have a 2:1 rate of success (or 67%) to really generate a significant offensive benefit for the team.

When the power boom of the 1990s arrived, the double-negative nature of caught stealing (losing both an out and a baserunner) became more apparent.

In the olden days there used to be lots of guys stealing 25 bases and getting thrown out 20 times, but now if a player steals 10 bases and gets thrown out 8 times, the manager tells him to quit.

 

To answer the OP question, this is correct. The whiny bitch Pujols doesn't like it.

 

He's not the only one. Jim Leyland repeatedly derided Quintin Berry for going 22-of -23 in SBs (!???) a couple seasons ago, because supposedly the base stealing was messing up the concentration of Miguel Cabrera.

The same rationale was used this year by Ausmus when Rajai Davis and Anthony Gose were challenging for the league lead in SBs the first month or so of the season -- supposedly Cabrera and Ian Kinsler said it was messing them up at the plate, so an end was put to it.*

 

Quintin Berry's career total was a perfect 25 steals in 25 attempts until yesterday afternoon when Tony Cruz threw him out as Berry attempted to steal second in the 9th inning of the Cardinals-Cubs game.

 

OK, I thought he was thrown out once in 2012.

However, this essentially goes to prove the point: that a MLB player with a career SB % of 100.0 is considered so marginal a talent that in three seasons since his only season with significant PT, he's played in a total of 25 games.

So, effectively, base stealing ability, in and of itself, is considered a worthless skill.

 

Terrance Gore is 8-for-8 in his career stealing bases. Just think how many more he'd have once he gets his first hit.

 

In the postseason when you need fewer pitchers because of all the extra off days, it's probably not a terrible idea to burn a roster spot on a pinch-running specialist who offers little to nothing else. That's what the Royals did with Gore last year, and he came through with steals in a couple of big spots, including in the wild-card game.

 

I'd be interested to see how the caught-stealing rates have changed over the years. I've always had a theory that the rise of shutdown catchers like Pudge Rodriguez in the 90's did as much to curtail stolen bases as a shift to station-to-station power ball.

 

That and pitchers getting much better at holding runners.

 

I don't have any stats to back it up, but anecdotally that asshole Pujols swung and fouled off so many times Trout was trying to steal second. Trout could have maybe just said "F it" given the wear and tear.