Fantasy Freestyle: The Art of the Steal

With the exception of saves, stolen bases are the category most likely to make people moan and groan in fantasy baseball. The value of the stolen base is disproportionate to what it is in real life, which generates a great deal of frustration when it comes to constructing teams in roto leagues. Some go as far to suggest that the solution is to play in a (shudder) points league.

Two common beliefs among fantasy players are that: 1) stolen bases are not all that valuable and 2) stolen bases can found easily on the free agent pool. In this article, I will examine both of these perceptions and see how well they hold up under scrutiny.

Table 1: Players with 20 or more stolen bases, 2015

Table 1 lists the 30 major leaguers who stole 20 bases or more in 2015. In order to show the complete picture, I included the full 5×5 stat line for all of these players. Including Goldschmidt and Braun here is fine; presenting them as “stolen base” plays by hiding all of their other stats would be misleading. Looking at the hitters on Table 1, it is fairly clear which players were drafted for steals and which players were not, but rather than use some kind of arbitrary home run cutoff, I decided not to manually intervene with the data.

In drafts, it does appear that stolen bases are “cheap”. Pollock, Cain, Marisnick, Gose, Machado, and Fowler all finished 100-199 slots ahead of their ADP, while Phillips and Inciarte exceeded their ADP by over 200 slots. This doesn’t even include Burns, Pillar, DeShields, and Maybin, who weren’t taken as Top 500 draft picks in NFBC leagues at all.

This is a success-oriented sort, so it is logical that there would be a high number of bargains on the table. What is more telling to me is how these players were viewed in 2016 drafts. I can understand why players like Marisnick, Gose, and Maybin were discounted as severely as they were. Playing time matters, and while playing the upside game is fun, at bats are still king. It is with established veterans like Segura (37 ADP slots below last year’s earnings’ ranking), LeMahieu (84), Phillips (156), and Gardner (89) where I am puzzled. There is a significant stolen base discount baked into the draft rankings not only of players whose value is primarily generated from speed, but for players who offer value in other aspects of their game as well. Even near-elite players like Charlie Blackmon (14) and Lorenzo Cain (33) are discounted quite a bit relative to their 2015 earnings.

For comparable power hitters, you do not see the same kind of mass discounts across the board.

Table 2: Players with 27 or more home runs, 2015

On the whole, these hitters are discounted compared to 2015. But the average ADP of 70 for 2016 is only 19 slots behind the average earnings of these hitters in 2015. Gattis, Alvarez, and Rodriguez all take significant pay cuts, but there isn’t nearly the same across-the-board penny pinching that there was for the stolen base kings. For the most part, fantasy managers pay the full freight for power. They don’t do the same for stolen bases.

It turns out that we do not value stolen bases correctly. The biggest hitting bargains in deep mixed leagues are stolen base guys, and this is because we don’t pay for them. There is a circular logic to this. Fantasy managers don’t value stolen bases properly. Therefore, they are a bargain. Power is valued appropriately; therefore, it is not a bargain.

Smart fantasy managers know this. Parlaying this knowledge into fun times and crushing your opponents into subatomic dust particles is easier said than done. If everyone else is undervaluing speed, it doesn’t help you if you take Dee Gordon, Jose Altuve, and Billy Hamilton with three of your first six or seven draft picks. If you can trade one or two of these hitters for help in another category later on bully for you, but having an extreme categorical excess often leads to a disadvantage on the trade front. If you can’t catch up in home runs and RBI, it doesn’t matter if you win steals by 150.

The PFM and other projection systems try to account for this in valuation, but even so tend to regard steals more highly than the market does. I’m OK taking Altuve or Gordon ahead of the rest of the pack, but a valuation system that tells me to take three of these guys isn’t going to be very useful in real time draft or auction conditions.

This leads me to my second question: how plentiful are stolen bases in the free agent pool once the season begins? Part of the premise of discounting steals at the draft is that there are plenty available later on the waiver wire. Is this premise accurate?

Free Agents: 15-Team Mixed Leagues, 2015, 20+ steals: Billy Burns, Cameron Maybin, Delino DeShields, D.J. LeMahieu, Ender Inciarte, Jake Marisnick, Jarrod Dyson, Kevin Pillar.

Free Agents: 15-Team Mixed Leagues, 2015, 20-plus home runs: Brandon Crawford, Carlos Correa, Colby Rasmus, Justin Bour, Luis Valbuena, Mitch Moreland.

The idea that home runs are significantly more difficult to find than stolen bases in the free agent pool doesn’t hold up under any kind of scrutiny. Yes, there were more players available with 20 or more stolen bases via free agency. But at 8-6, it was hardly a slam dunk. Overpaying for steals in your draft is bad. But shying away from them because you believe “they’ll be available later” is worse.

In researching this article, I thought I’d find that steals were more plentiful in 12-team leagues. But this wasn’t the case. A shallower league in 2015 found more solid home run hitters into the free agent pool than it did stolen base elites.

Free Agents: 12-Team Mixed Leagues, 2015 20-plus steals (not including above): Anthony Gose.

Free Agents: 12-Team Mixed Leagues, 2015, 20-plus home runs (not including above): Adam Lind, Ryan Howard, Mark Teixeira, Trevor Plouffe, Alex Rodriguez, Kendrys Morales, Mike Moustakas.

Perhaps this is simply a one-year fluke. But looking at 2015 alone, if you missed out on steals in your auction last year, you would have had a hard time getting them via free agency.

I suspect the reason that the “steals are scarce” perception exists is because the climate for stolen bases has changed while the idea that they’re easy to come by via free agency has not.

Table 3: Major League, 5×5 Categories: 2010 versus 2015 (pitchers not included)

Not all of these statistics can be packed onto a fantasy roster. However, a 453 steal drop and a 287 home run increase league wide is going to have an impact on what is available in the free agent pool as well as on what these statistics are worth. The dip in stolen bases over the last five seasons has primarily impacted the top end of the player pool. In 2015, 30 players had 20 or more stolen bases, compared to 35 players in 2010. However, where 19 players stole 30 or more bases in 2010, only seven players turned the trick in 2015. Elite stolen base players—uncommon in recent years—have become even more scarce the last couple of seasons. With Charlie Blackmon, A.J. Pollock, and Ben Revere all on the DL in 2016, the paucity of elite stolen base options this year is painful.

If you have fallen behind early in the category, you cannot simply assume that a trade will cure what ails your fantasy team. The paradigm that “steals are easy to get” is an old one, and has shifted over the last few years. It is okay to decide that you want to dump stolen bases or not pay too much in FAAB or trade for the category. However, as with anything else, you want to make sure that you are making a decision based on accurate information, and not based on outdated and/or poor competitive intelligence.