Brent Rooker Steals Bases Now

Before this 2024 season, Brent Rooker had never stolen more than four bases. He now has 11. With just a few games left, he’s projected (Steamer RoS) to steal no more. Brent Rooker was never supposed to steal 11, he wasn’t even expected to steal more than three. But now, in 2024, Brent Rooker steals bases.

We need to see one of these bad boys, we need to watch Rooker steal a base:

Rooker’s run didn’t even entice a throw from young Yainer Diaz. Even Jeremy Peña’s body language expressed his support of the no-throw. What’s gotten into Rooker? For starters, it’s not like Rooker’s 11 stolen bases have defied expectations to such an incredible extent. However, he is outside of the margin for error within his group of base stealers, those who were projected before the season began to steal somewhere between three and ten bases according to Steamer:

Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) measures the differences between the observed and predicted values. Those in Rooker’s group (3-10 SB projection) have an approximate six stolen bases margin for error. Rooker, being eight bags better than his prediction, has defied expectations in 2024, and at age 29, he’s no spring chicken. Yet, the speed of his twenties has not left him in that sweet, sweet year 29. His sprint speed is 27.6 feet per second, which places him above league average, just so. Speed is generally not something that appears one day, and Rooker has always been quick, but he never made much of an attempt to use it on the basepaths. That changed slightly in 2023 when Rooker went four-for-four on stolen base attempts.

Is this a story of a perfect base stealer who finally realized he really was fast all along? No. This season he’s been caught three times out of 14, making his stolen base success rate 78.6%. That’s not great. Out of the 117 players with at least 10 stolen bases in 2024, that ranks 79th. But there are some really good base stealers in that pool. Let’s isolate things by only viewing players from an expectation standpoint. The chart below shows this season’s sprint speeds and stolen base totals among players who are included in that second bar from the left above, those expected by Steamer to steal between three and ten bases:

He may not be Rickey Henderson, but he’s stealing more than some of his peers. The red dots are the few players slower than Rooker, yet collecting more stolen bases than him. That would include Luis Rengifo (24), Willy Adames (19), Jesús Sánchez (14), and Jake Bauers (12). The yellow dots represent players like Byron Buxton (7), Mike Trout (6), and Ezequiel Duran (1) who are faster than Rooker, but steal less bases due to injury or less playing time. Some of those yellow dots are fast players who could potentially steal 3o or more bags in a season yet never play and/or get on base, like Victor Scott II.

Rooker’s 588 plate appearances, a career-high, have aided his stolen base opportunities. In addition, Rooker is a three-true-outcomes type of player, as was pointed out by Ben Clemens earlier in the season. Walks are included in those three outcomes and while Rooker’s BB% of 9.7% is above league average, it’s not going to be found on any leaderboards. His OBP, however, has been a stellar .367 this season. That’s just below Bryce Harper’s .372 and tied with William Contreras, Kyle Schwarber, and Gunnar Henderson. Getting on base more often has simply given Rooker more opportunities to steal.

Not only is Rooker stealing more bases, he’s hitting more home runs. As was pointed out in Clemens’ piece, Rooker has crushed the ball in 2024 while being unafraid of the strikeout. Yet his 28.4% K% is actually down from 2023’s 32.7%. He has eight more home runs (38) than he finished 2023 with and his slugging percentage has jumped up from .488 in 2023 to a current .570. Even with all that swing and miss, his batting average will finish the year just south of .300.

Does this have anything to do with the fact that Brent Rooker is on an Oakland A’s team one year before he is eligible for arbitration? Is that a punk take? Maybe. But for a player who may never see free agency, he’s not eligible until 2028, arbitration is the next best thing. Stealing more bases and collecting more extra-base hits might be just what Rooker needs to make a career that started in 2017 a financial success. Take a look at some handpicked Oakland Athletics and the results of their Arbitration 1 years:

For each of those players listed, here are their pre-arb and arb year statistics:

Sadly, the pandemic-shortened 2020 season creeps into our Matt Olson and Matt Chapman numbers, as both went to arbitration after that strange year. Amongst this small sample of Oakland Athletics, there’s no pattern of turning on the jets so the player has a little something extra to show the arbitration panel at the end of the season. Whether players hit more home runs and steal more bases as a whole may warrant another study with larger samples. Let’s stick with small samples for now and look at the skill changes that influence the “pay-check” stats:

Consistency in plate appearances is more than half the battle for fantasy baseball and player salary hopes in arbitration. It’s easy to assume that players are trying their best to accumulate plate appearances each season regardless of whether or not they’ll face an arbitration panel before the next. But, one more stat to consider when questioning a player’s attempt to hit more home runs before arbitration may be found in their launch angle. Perhaps players are intentionally hitting the bottom half of the ball, attempting to get it up in the air more often? Each one of the A’s above increased their average launch angles between PreArb and Arb year seasons.

All of these rate-stat and accumulator-stat terms, only used in the dorkiest of baseball blogs, are freaking Grammarly’s large language models way the heck out, so I’ll come to my conclusion now. Brent Rooker has beaten his home run and stolen base pre-season projections in 2024 and I hope he gets paid for it. That’s part of the reason there is such a thing as arbitration. It doesn’t matter if the owner of his baseball team is…doing whatever it is he’s doing…Rooker should get paid for his hard work and success. If players who are in their Arb1 year help you and your fantasy team get paid too, so be it. There is a thread here that may need to be pulled on a little more. Will the batters eligible for Arb1 at the conclusion of next season be players to target in drafts? Will they suddenly start stealing more bases, hitting more home runs, and outperforming their projections? Will they be next season’s Brent Rooker?