[LeeD]

Note that this applies to OOTP 24 and earlier, as the devs have obviously made some modifications to OOTP25. It remains to be seen how much these changes will affect performance.

Rules of thumb. Aggressive baserunning is good. Aggressive stealing is bad. Trick is to understand the speed and stealing ratings, especially since what constitutes a "good rating" changes over the course of the year due to ratings creep (which also affects fielding, with higher catcher and outfield arms ratings as the yearly cycle progresses). Big red flag is a player who is really fast and has a good steal rating which is lower than the speed rating. He'll run into a lot of outs by getting caught. You want the player's steal rating to be 6 or more points higher than speed, with both being in the blue, to consider him elite.

You generally want to push the global slider for running to the right and the global sliders for stealing and hit-and-run left, then adjust player strategy settings leftward for the slow runners. Completely turn off stealing for anyone whose rating isn't green or blue, but don't bump them up unless they're absolutely elite at stealing bases. Even in this case, the increase in steals is likely to be accompanied by a decrease in success rate. The player might go from 37-4 to 55-11, so measure the trade-off against the run environment of your league and ballpark.

In the grand scheme of things, on-base and power are a lot more important than baserunning; but going from -10 to plus 20 on the bases is still 30 more runs scored.