Quote:
Originally Posted by stevem810
The Crew is projected to lead the league in stolen bases. Is that the plan long term? A speedy team that will attempt stolen bases?
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We have led the league in this category the past two seasons (which is the entire history of this league, after all) as well. I do like to get athletic players who tend to combine speed with defensive skills. But this has unfortunately led to not paying enough attention to power skills.
More troubling, I keep having to adjust team (and some individual) strategy in terms of stealing bases (I play out every game but mostly let the AI manage based upon strategy settings) as our success rate in this category has been quite poor. I'm hoping that this has something to do with lack of experience, as I've noticed some of the worst success rates are among players who are at the top of the scale in both speed and stolen base skills (Ruben Souffront, Zack Banks, to name two) and it seems like with their ratings they would have to get better eventually.
Some of the best stolen base percentages on my team tend to come from players with solidly above average speed and very good (but not top end) basestealing ratings (Tanner Yurek, Antonio Puente).
(Edit: Well, looking back through this thread I see that Puente did not finish with a very good stolen base % in 1966 at all. In fact, nearly everyone on the team had a worse success rate in 1966 than they did in 1965, except Yurek, who was quite good in 1965 and even better this past season. Chad Brown was someone who had a very good success rate in '65 only to see '66 devolve to break even. Souffront really wasn't even that bad in '65. But '66 was another story. Not quite sure what happened here. Though perhaps it has something to do with statistical modifiers for 1965 being based upon MLB 1965, and in 1966 I changed that to 1970 MLB.)
So, short answer is, we will probably continue to be at or near the top of this category for the foreseeable future, but unless we can get more efficient in our base stealing it will likely hurt us more than help us.