[Syd Thrift]

Ok, but is there statistical evidence that catchers have much of an ability to influence steals against them outside of their caught stealing percentages in real life? It’s my admittedly undocumented experience that in game players steal for close to the same success rate against good catchers as bad but attempt way more vs bad ones. That’s an argument that that should get flattened out though more than that we should add a “pop time” rating that IRL is something individual pitchers and not catchers influence.

It’s definitely the case, though, that pitchers do have a huge influence over caught stealing rates as well as attempt rates. It’s hard to find data on this but i know Fooliah Baseball for instance looked at that catcher from 10 years ago who finished with something like a 5% caught stealing rate and found that this was actually caused by the pitchers on that team (the Pirates?) throwing from a windup with men on base. I remember Chris Widger getting similarly dinged one year in Montreal in the 90s. And again, I wish I could find stats but I’m almost positive that the best pitchers at holding runners have rates better than I-Rod, even taking the fact that most pickoffs don’t count as caught stealing into account (and of course there are guys who are terrible at holding runners who are worse than any catcher but that’s to be expected since catchers who can’t throw out runners generally don’t keep their jobs).

Even in Rodriguez’ case I specifically remember people complaining that he’d often call for fastballs in good steal situations regardless of whether or not the guy on the mound had a good fastball that day. I’m not sure how you’d put that into a game like OOTP - I guess you could have it reflected in a relatively low “range” rating but then you’d have people complain that the all time greatest catcher shouldn’t have a 40/80 fielding or whatever.

I guess what I’d like to see is teams deciding whether to run or not based far more on their lead off of first (and therefore the Hold Runners rating) than the catcher’s arm. While there is probably some reluctance to steal off of guys with cannons I don’t think it’s nearly as big of a difference as the game makes it out to be, and if a runner has a green light and a good lead, he’s going to assume he’s going to make that base regardless of who’s behind the plate.