Birchwood Brothers 4.1: WAR! What Is It Good For?

Absolutely…nothing! For our immediate purposes, that is. The usual off-season lull, further deadened by the glacial free agent market, has left us with nothing current and baseballish to ponder during the long winter, other than stuff that, frankly, doesn’t interest us much. Thus, the WAR wars—in brief, Bill James, the Cornel West of sabermetrics, doesn’t like WAR as an evaluative tool—have left us longing for PEACE! (Though if your curiosity is piqued, here’s a judicious evaluation by our Fangraphs colleague Dave Cameron.)

Likewise the Hall of Fame debate, which has long outlasted our attenuated interest. Your stats tell you that Curt Schilling should be inducted into the Hall of Fame instantly? OK with us. You’d prefer to see him tarred and feathered? Godspeed, say we. Just don’t bother us about it any more. We have less important things to think about.

We are the Birchwood Brothers, two baseball-enamored, Fantasy-obsessed bona fide siblings, aggregate age 128, uncrowned kings of Fangraphs’ 2017 preseason predictions (read this if you don’t believe us), now back for a fourth season of Fantasy ruminations, divagations, and recommendations, seasoned with bad puns, pretentious allusions, and jokes nobody gets. Our—and probably your—draft and auction season is underway, and we’re here to share our insights and experiences with you.

By the time you read this, we will have begun our Fantasy season with our traditional entry in an NFBC slow draft, each league of which entails 15 teams picking 50 players each, with as much as four hours between picks, an interval that can prove frustrating but suits our clogged dopaminergic pathways. Our slow draft last season was catastrophic, as many of you opined that it was, but we’ve learned from our mistakes—“draft better players” is our takeaway from that debacle—and expect to improve this year.

Along the way, and throughout the preseason, we’ll tell you about particular players we like and why we like them. But let’s start by talking generally about stolen bases. Some teams attempt steals lots more than other teams. Thus, for example, over the last three seasons, the Orioles, managed by Buck Showalter, have attempted to steal a total of 146 times, which is less than three teams attempted in 2018 alone. Looking at numbers like this (and far more elaborate and sophisticated ones), Fangraphs titan Jeff Zimmerman last week concluded that “managers have their own stolen base attempt tendencies,” such that a player who’d steal 8 bases for Showalter would steal 22 for the Angels’ allegedly run-happy Mike Scioscia.

Though we hesitate to challenge a titan, we beg to differ. We think, in fact, that every manager in MLB has gotten the memo—the stolen base is a losing strategy unless you succeed about 70% of the time, which only fast guys can do. Indeed, at this point, they probably don’t let you be a manager unless you’ve gotten the memo. Even managers who like to run, like Terry Francona, acknowledge as much. You can see it in the aggregate stats: of the 30 major league teams last season, 20 of them attempted steals between 4 and 6% of the time they had the opportunity, a bunching that suggests to us a rough unanimity of outlook. More importantly, it appears that, if you give Manager X a fast guy, he’ll run, and if you don’t, he won’t.

Thus, give Scioscia Cameron Maybin, Ben Revere, Andrelton Simmons, and Eric Young, Jr. and he will run; take them away and, by and large, he won’t, not any more than anyone else. Give Francona Jacoby Ellsbury in his prime or Rajai Davis in his dotage and he runs a whole lot; remove them and he doesn’t. Conversely, when Showalter has a really fast guy, like Nate McLouth in 2013 and the second half of 2012, he gives him the green light. He just doesn’t have any such guys right now.

The best example we know of this involves cashiered Mets manager Terry Collins. In 2014, playing in then-cavernous Citi Field and with Young, Jr. (he does get around) on the team, the Mets attempted 135 steals, 5th in the NL. In 2015, Young was gone, Juan Lagares was hurting, and the Mets moved the fences in, whereupon they attempted only 76 steals, last in the NL. As far as we know, Collins didn’t have a Pauline conversion experience on the road to Flushing Meadows. He just had less speed and less reason to use it.

As this example suggests, context matters. But we think the relevant contexts involve ballpark and lineup, not manager. The Yankees, given their powerful lineup and their ballpark, aren’t likely to run as much with Brett Garner (who can still fly at 34) as the punchless Giants might, playing in a park where fly balls go to die. But we think that pretty much any manager—Showalter, Francona, Scioscia, Collins, whoever—would run about as much as any other, given the same ballpark and the same lineup.

If we’re right, does it do us any good? Conceivably. We read that the Orioles are interested in acquiring the extremely fast (12th in all-time career stolen base percentage) free agent Jarrod Dyson. Part of this, no doubt, is because of Dyson’s glove. He’s one of the best center fielders in baseball, whereas Oriole incumbent Adam Jones is among the worst. But we speculate that the Orioles also want Dyson in order to steal bases. They want a weapon they don’t have, and, we further speculate, they will use it promiscuously if they get it.

Showalter did exactly the same thing with McLouth, with whom he attempted to steal 15% of the time, as opposed to the 10% McLouth had attempted in his career theretofore. Dyson’s NFBC Average Draft position is 432, which means no one’s taking him until the reserve rounds. We think that’s a mistake, and it’s one we’re hoping not to make.