2007 seemed to me to be a barrage of base stealing attempts and hit and runs put on by Tiger manager Jim Leyland. I say ’seemed’ since before looking into the statistics I didn’t have any proof that this was the case. Maybe it was just all the hit and runs called for by Jim Leyland in the attempt to jump start the back of the lineup throughout the season or the entire offense in the last quarter, but Detroit was really middle of the road (13th in the MLB, 6th in the AL, 2th in the AL Central Division) when it came to base stealing attempts.
That said, the number of attempts did rise from 100 attempts in 2006 to 133 attempts in 2007 though Detroit did have more opportunities to steal in 2007. After last season Lee Panas, who runs the Tiger Tales blog, did a nice review of Tigers base running in 2006. While he has yet to do so this year, though plans on it, the overview is based on all base running and focused player by player statistics.
While individual player stats are interesting here, Jim Leyland has a pretty tight control over who steals and when. Outside of Gary Sheffield, who had a constant green light, players didn’t tend to steal unless signaled. I thought it would be interesting to see how Leyland ranked in terms of the Tigers historically in steal attempts which overturned my initial thinking.
Wanting to see which managers took the opportunity to steal, when available, most often I looked at the number of base stealing attempts vs the number of opportunities to steal. To get the number of opportunities available I simply took the TOB (times on base) and subtracted home runs and triples. Below are the top three and bottom three years in terms of base stealing attempts:
| Year | Rank | Attempts | Att Opp | Attempt % | Manager |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1979 | 1st | 262 | 1844 | 14.21% | Moss / Tracewski / Anderson |
| 1997 | 2nd | 233 | 1834 | 12.70% | Buddy Bell |
| 2001 | 3rd | 194 | 1757 | 11.04% | Phil Garner |
| ………. | |||||
| 2007 | 24th | 133 | 1955 | 6.80% | Jim Leyland |
| ………. | |||||
| 1967 | 48th | 58 | 1804 | 3.22% | Mayo Smith |
| 1959 | 49th | 51 | 1780 | 2.87% | Norman / Dykes |
| 1972 | 50th | 38 | 1566 | 2.43% | Billy Martin |
The 2007 season was right smack dab in the middle. Nothing special there. One minor interesting stat was that 2007 was the most successful year for base stealing succeeding on 77.44% of the attempts. (Billy Martin’s 1972 season ranked worst, succeeding only 44.74% of the time.) This certainly smashed my theory that Leyland was a base stealing maniacal failure.
Oh well. I still wish he’d ease up a bit, especially on the hit and runs.
D-Town Baseball
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