Ladies And Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Gentrifying

“The romance of New York [City] during that era is contagious.” So comments a reviewer of a recent book of photographs from said era. And what era might that be? The melting-pot 1920s? The beatnik 1950s? The pot-and-protests 60s? The dot-com 90s? Nope; the 70s. The pink mist of nostalgia that now envelops 1970s New York City puzzles us a bit. In memoir after memoir—most of them quite good, by the way—1970s NYC is portrayed as culturally and intellectually heady beyond the imaginings of those then unborn or unfledged. But at the same time, it’s depicted as dirty, dangerous, and broke, and the memoirists describe it as if they’d survived the trenches at Guadalcanal.

We ourselves aren’t nostalgic about 1970s New York, or 1970s anywhere else, for that matter. In one respect, though, we kind of miss the decade, because (awkward segue coming) it saw the rise of the lively-ball-era stolen base. Even in the 60s, of course, there were stolen-base avatars like Maury Wills and Luis Aparicio. They’d steal fifty or more bases and lead the league every year. Otherwise, though, nothing: on average, a 60s team would attempt a stolen base about every other game.

This changed over the course of the 70s—we won’t digress now to investigate the reasons—until, by 1980, teams were averaging more than an attempt a game. (They’re about midway between the 60s and the 70s today.) This development made baseball a lot more exciting and fun to watch. Of course, we were still in the pre-sabermetric Dark Ages then, so no one really understood that the stolen base, as a tactic, is break-even or worse unless you succeed two times out of three. And baseball being baseball, once a few managers were running with abandon and succeeding, most of the other managers were trying to run, too—even the ones who shouldn’t have been. Thus, you see both individual and team stat lines that you’d never see today. In 1974, the Houston Astros’ Greg Gross (one of our all-time favorite players, by the way) was thrown out on 20 of his 32 stolen base attempts. In 1976, the Cubs tried to steal 148 times—more attempts than all but 3 MLB teams made last season—and succeeded exactly half the time. Essentially, the good 70s managers deployed the stolen base sensibly, and the less-good managers deployed the caught-stealing instead.

Nowadays, most managers get it. They run promiscuously when they’ve got guys who can do it and the tactic otherwise makes sense, and they don’t run at all when they don’t and it doesn’t. In 2014, the Mets, playing in a cavern and with Eric Young on the team, tried 135 steals, 5th in the NL. Last season, with Citi Field cozier, Young gone, and Juan Lagares hurting, they made 76 attempts, last in the NL. Similarly, in 2014, Don Mattingly rummaged around his toolbox at the start of the season, uncovered Dee Gordon, and gave him the starting second base job. The Dodgers led the league in SBAs. Last year, with Gordon in Miami, the Dodgers made only 93 attempts, which was 13th in the NL. Mattingly’s reunion with Gordon in Florida should be entertaining, for them and for us.

No, we didn’t drag you through four paragraphs just to tell you that Dee Gordon is likely to steal a lot of bases this season. It’s tough, though, to find surplus Roto value at draft time when it comes to stolen bases. We pretty much already know who the fast guys are; players can hone their baserunning skills, but that’s at the margins, statistically speaking. As Bill James notes in this year’s BJ Handbook, you can’t teach a guy to run faster. And, we’re positing, there’s no longer much difference among managers in terms of stolen base tactics. Are there nonetheless any situations in which a change of venue for a player and/or a change of manager for a team might make for stolen base sleepers?

Maybe a couple. When he’s completely healthy, which he often isn’t, Cameron Maybin is a very fast guy. Last year with Atlanta, he stole 23 bases in 29 attempts. He stole 40 of 48 one year with San Diego. Now he’s with Detroit. He’s a center fielder by trade, and will be competing for a job with Anthony Gose. We’ve said unkind things about Gose in the past, and we’ll keep on going: Maybin is a better hitter, he’s faster, and he’s about as good a fielder (though he doesn’t have as good an arm as Gose does).

So say Maybin gets the job. What then? Well, the Tigers’ manager is Brad Ausmus. Whether because of or despite of the fact that Ausmus was one of the best defensive catchers ever, he appears to be a bit more partial to the stolen base than circumstances perhaps justify. The 2015 Tigers were fourth from the top in the AL in stolen-base attempts, and third from the bottom in SB%. The numbers for Ausmus’s rookie year as a manager in 2014 were roughly congruent. So we’ve got Maybin, a guy who’s likelier to win a job than people expect, and Ausmus, who’s likely to ask Maybin to steal more often than people expect. Instead of the 15 to 20 SBs that most projections for Maybin envision, we think it’s more like 25 to 30. Which is to say that, whereas the market, as embodied in NFBC Average Draft Position, looks at Maybin and sees ADP 226, we see someone more like Billy Burns (ADP 150) or Delino DeShields (ADP 167).

Anyone else? Conceivably. The Dodgers’ new manager is Dave Roberts. He has no managerial track record, but when he was a player his speed is what kept him in the bigs. He was an elite base stealer; indeed, he stole what’s probably the most famous base in baseball history. (Every other fetishizable object connected with that steal is in Cooperstown, so the famous base is probably there somewhere too.) Perhaps Roberts will turn out to be partial to the stolen base as a tactic. Has he got fast guys who can assist him? How about Carl Crawford, one of the greatest base stealers ever? Crawford’s younger than you think—he’s 34—and it looks like he can still run (10 SBs in 12 attempts during limited playing time last year). Andre Ethier is probably ahead of Crawford in left field on the Dodgers’ depth chart at the moment, but maybe Roberts’s partiality to steals changes that. And one gathers that the Dodgers are trying hard to trade Ethier anyway. Of course, one has gathered that for several years, and it hasn’t happened. Moreover, one also gathers that the Dodgers are trying to trade Crawford, too. But what of it? He probably winds up someplace where he’s appreciated more, gets more playing time, and gets more steals as a result. Either way, he’s worth more than a 32nd-round pick, which is where his 481 ADP puts him.

Additional thoughts on this subject next time, we hope, unless more pressing matter intervenes. We are retreating to the laboratory to try to deduce the identity or identities of this year’s Dee Gordon, i.e. an uproven player or players who might wind up having a breakout stolen-base season. Beyond the obvious guys, we mean—in other words, not Trea Turner (ADP 269) or Jose Peraza (ADP 288), who seem to us to be properly valued by the market, in light of the facts that they may not (a) make the team, (b) start, or (c) hit. Meanwhile, stop by @birchwoodbroth2 on Twitter if you want to stay abreast of our NFBC slow draft, in which our results so far have been as unpalatably mixed as a butterscotch Bloody Mary.