I had King Kelly batting leadoff (until today) with a SB attempt setting of 0.

But the sim ignored the 0 and had him attempt to steal 66 times out of 190 times on base. Since many of those hits and BBs came with runners on, I have to assume that Sparky is having Kelly steal against my will at least half the times that he's on first with no one ahead of him on the bases. He's stolen 32 bases and been thrown out 34 times -- ugh!

Does anyone here have experience with Boggs leading off? Does the sim make him attempt steals? Or is Kelly being sent only because he's leading off and has a 70 speed rating and a RL record of attempting steals?

In any case, what's the point of a managerial setting for player steal attempts, if the Sim ignores it?

Did you use McGraw at leadoff?

I've noticed before on teams that my leadoff batter will have a bunch of steals/attempts even when no one else was running. So I've assumed that the sim program favors leadoff batters attempting to steal.

I'm pretty sure the SIM does favor certain spots in the batting order for stolen base attempts.  Lead-off is definitely one of them.  However, I set almost all of my players to 0 for stolen bases, and I've never seen the SIM attempt a straight steal with any of those guys, no matter where they hit in the batting order.  The only time Kelly or McGraw or any of those high-volume/poor success rate guys steal a base for me is when it's part of a hit-and-run.  Sounds like a ticket is in order, assuming your SB setting really was at 0. 

I recently changed my H&R setting back to Average after doing some research that convinced me that the H&R Very Aggressive setting had little positive effect. I never saw in checking boxscore play-by-plays any sign that it was causing King Kelly to get thrown out excessively. At an average of 2.15 team H&R per game, it would be unlikely to result in a 32-34 steal record in any case.

yeah, but if you had the Hi-and-Run set at 5, how many of the attempts were in fact the front end of one of those???

That's a reasonable question, wonk. I just don't think he's been on base enough for that situation to account for 66 steal attempts, though it must have caused some of them. (I don't think I'm interested enough to go back and look them up game by game.)