Let's put the soon to be elected officials to work.
 

I propose, of course after our honoured officials enter office, hire 22yr old office interms etc etc, that we discuss a change to improve the SB success in the league. Base stealing has pretty much been elimanated as an offensive weapon. If a player is not successful 67% of the time, he is doing more harm then good when attempting to swipe a bag. (see stolen base runs)
Last season FOOL catchers threw out 43.5% of basestealers.
in MLB this season catchers are averaging 36.5%.
Sure it's not a huge difference, but it will help turn basestealing into an offensive threat again.
If we adjust the SB Success modifer to 112, it should make the SB success rate a little more accurate.

Just my sugestion...a small tweak to add an new element to the game.

They're currently at .899 (attempts) and .979 (success %), based roughly on SD's modifiers. Or at least, the last time I checked 'em. He's changed them a few times.

Good lord, about time this was brought up. This is the only change I can say I have been dying to see. Base stealing right now is crap IMO, and needs to be amped up at the least a little bit.

Provided we can get the BoD seated by Thursday, we can get this change enacted before the season starts. Because that's an interesting stat that I didn't even check out, but...good research and something that'd be great for increasing offensive production in our league.

I am very much for this. I am a NL manager trapped in an RL league organization. I like my guys to run, but they get thrown out WAYYYY too much.

Ok, I am ready to work on getting this amped up. I am not a 'settings' guy, not having messed around with things like that. I do know stealing bases needs to get a kick in the pants so it is an actual part of the game and not a 50-50 coin flip for a guy with 100 speed and 100 stealing ratings.

im on board with eveyone on this issue as well.

I'm on board too.

I think increasing attempts to 1.000 and success to 1.120 is a good start. We could try it for a few seasons and then tweak up or down as necessary, but operating with less steals is probably the bigger culprit than even the higher failed success rate we're seeing.

I don't think increasing the attempts is correct. I believe we already have too many SB attempts. It is the success rate that is the thing that is off. I'll provide the stats in a few minutes to why I feel this is the case. I've already run the stats, just need to post them to show why I feel this way.

AL 2007 - 1354 496 (162 games)(14 teams) .815 73.2%
NL 2007 - 1564 506 (162 games)(16 teams) .798 75.6%


Team SB CS SBA/G SB%

Ann Arbor 127 79 (154 games) 1.33
Atlanta 85 84 1.09
Baltimore 63 54 .759
Boston 163 118 1.82
Brooklyn 178 147 2.11
Colorado 117 107 1.45
Columbus 98 83 1.17
Compton 52 37 .577
El Paso 45 42 .564
Hartford 99 75 1.12
New York 90 83 1.12
Quad City 180 106 1.85
Rio Grande 51 63 .740
Texas 124 74 1.28
Toronto 98 73 1.11
Valdosta 102 59 1.04

League Avg 1672 1284 (154 games)(16 teams) 1.20 56.6%

Well that came out uglier than I intended it to.

I used a fairly small sample size, but it is pretty easy to look at other years of MLB for comparison if people feel the need to.

Considering that MLB plays 162 games a season to our 154 games a season, I had to break it down to Steal attempts per game as well as SB success rate which is independent of how many games you play. The AL has 14 teams and NL has 16 teams to the 16 teams in FOOL.

Stolen Base attempts is defined as total Stolen Bases + Caught Stealing

Based on the 2007 season, the AL and the NL both roughly averaged 0.8 stolen base attempts from each team per game.

In FOOL last season, the league average was 1.2 stolen base attempts from each team per game.

That means there was .4 MORE stolen base attempts per team in each game last season in FOOL than 2007 MLB which is a considerable increase.

Comparing Stolen base success percentages is much easier as that is not dependant on how many games are played or how many teams are in the league.

In MLB for 2007, the AL and NL roughly averaged 74% SB Success rate, compared to FOOL's success rate last season of 56.6%.

Bassed on these reports, that means two things are the case:

1) Way too many Stolen base attempts are occuring in FOOL
2) Way too many runners are getting caught stealing in FOOL.

We can lower "steals" in the game settings from Often to Normal or Very Often to Often. I haven't looked at them today. They came from SkyDog's settings again. But that'll lower the average rate. The caught stealing can be increased by simply affecting the success rate, as mentioned before.

Good research, Alan.

What direction should we go?

I tend to agree with Alan that attempts don't need to be increased at all. I was always happy with my attempts numbers, it was the fact my guys were caught half the time that drove me nuts.

I suggest we increase the success rate for now. In two seasons we can revisit this and see if we want to do one or two things....

1)Adjust the success rate again, one way or the other.
2)Adjust attempts

For now though I suggest just adjusting success.

The other thing I think we should caution against is a huge swing of league factors in one season is probably a bit unfair as well as possibly harmful. It is not really fair for teams to build a lineup based on the past 10+ years of stats from players only to have it drastically change after spending a bunch of money on various players whom suddenly are far better or worse because of this change.

A huge change could also push things too far in the opposite direction as well, since league factors seem to be more trial and error rather than an exact science.

I think my recommendation would be to do a series of small changes with re-evaluation every two seasons to see if it needs to be continued to change or not. Since FOOL happens so quickly, we're talking a change today and another possible change in 2 weeks which is not really slow all things considered.

I think my recommendation would be to make the following change:

Attempts set to .885 (-.014)
Success set to 1.00 (+.021)

(I am assuming I am not getting the factors backwards. sometimes I get confused if you push factors up to get more or less of something, but I think I have it correct in this case).

Then we can evaluate the change in the league the next two years to see if the totals for Stolen base attempts and successes end up more in line with reality. I don't think it has to be an exact match or even super close, but 56% just is way too low as others have said.

I support that change.

Item #2 can be "whoever takes over Toronto has to move them back to the States"...

I concure....on the one condition that if they move the team to the states, they have to take the entire city too...we don't want 'em anymore....

Alan, FANTASTIC job with this. Thanks for taking the time out to do the research on it and for the education :)

I would agree that the changes we would need to make be small and gradual, just in terms of fairness.

Forgive my dumb question here.

We as gm's have the ability to give our own guys the green light to go at every possible chance there is. I didnt do it last year but in the past I did it a ton. Wouldnt that affect and skew the attempt numbers a bit?

Yes, if every team was to run more than normal then that could affect the totals, but the chances of every team doing so isn't really practical I don't think.

For instance, my team was well over the MLB average of steals per game with 1.04 attempts per game, but I was below the FOOL average of 1.20 SB attempts per game. This makes sense to me as I figured out several years back that stealing did not seem to be very successful in this league and backed it off a whole bunch from my team. My team's strategy for stealing bases for instance is in the second from the lowest position.

In fact the only reason I believe that my team did actually steal as much as they even did was due to having three speedburners on the team in Ruben Mendoza, Edgardo Reyes and Juan Reyes whom totaled for 135 of my team's 161 stolen base attempts. I find in environments where it is tougher to be successful to steal, you should limit it as much as possible to only those whom had the best success rate. In my team's case I was above FOOL average in SB% with a 63.3% success rate for my team last year, but still that in my opinion was too low and I had planned to continue to change how my team handled stolen base attempts prior to this league factor change being brought up.

Yes, but due to the 50% success rate I backed off to either normal or lower on steal chances for my guys last season, and still ended up with a good chunk of attempts, so the numbers pass the sniff test.

Works for me then

Sorry I have been real busy the past several days at work and have not had much time to participate in discussion. I also believe the attempts should stay the same but perhaps move the success rate up by .01 every season for 3 seasons until it is at 1.09 and let it sit there for a 3 or 5 year trial period and see what we think.

Second I think we should also consider compensation. This would maybe help out with owners who are trading players for next to nothing because they are unable to get anything for them.