Win total predictions

My Top 50 MLB Players for 2025
The list isn't strictly how ordered by how much fWAR I project them to put up this year, but it is my general guide for how I ranked them.

This last one is including attempts against, so how many runs the other team gained stealing against them.

The list makes sense, we would expect guys like Turang and Ohtani who stole a ton of bases, but also the guys who stole at a super high clip like Lawrence Butler and again Ohtani. Elly De La Cruz led the MLB on stolen bases but is down the list a little because he was lower in terms of percentage.

This is the final outcome for team specific.

To find who added the most value we can take every stolen base attempt and calculate the actual value using the mean value added for that steal type. This is more direct because it is just the actual value gained or lose in that attempt.

The top teams only added between 10-20 runs, earlier I said 10 runs was about one win added that seems not significant when most teams are under 10 runs added and didn’t even add one win. I have two points to make.

1) two wins for AZ were the difference between a WS and not making the playoffs.

The second chart gives us more interesting information, as you can see there is a positive linear correlation between attempts and efficiency, for the red, but looking at the blue the line it is pretty flat signaling that there is no clear change is efficiency regardless of attempts.

Looking at the run value vs attempts chart I was hoping to see a parabolic curve where you could see where the maximum value can be found in terms of volume without sacrificing efficiency. There really isn’t one because teams who are not adding value through stealing will steal less.

Here is a chart of the expected run values based on success rate and what type of steal is being attempted. The highlighted column is mean expected value for that SB%. The mean isn't a perfect representation because it doesn't weight for frequency of steal type, but it's just a rough outline.

Expected value is used in probability to weight the outcomes based off of their “value” and their likelihood, so instead of just taking the difference between a successful attempt and an unsuccessful one we can use the chance of success to weight it.

Credit to Fangraphs for the last run matrix. That one was from 2014 so I used an updated version from 2023. Credit to Sunnyveil on Reddit for this one. To calculate the runs added from stealing a base you just take the difference from before the stolen base event and after the stolen base attempt.

A stolen base doesn’t directly score any runs so we need to measure how many runs it adds. I used the run expectancy matrix it takes into account the bases occupied and the amount of outs there are. Then using the data from the previous seasons they can calculate expected runs in the situation

To find the value of a stolen base first we need quantify what value is and for baseball it’s fairly simple, the goal is to win and to win you need more runs that the other team, so our scale for value will be runs. 10 runs in run differential correlates to about one win.

After seeing the impact of the rule changes causing the increase in stolen bases I wanted to look at how valuable stealing is. Here my list of the top teams who have created the most runs from SB and if you are interested in reading about the process it will be below.