Hey Folks,

I wanted to put '61 Mickey Mantle on my next team.  I did some experimenting with him on SimMatchup and found him to get caught stealing around 40% of the time with "B" arm catchers.  Keep in mind, Mantle's SB's for that actual season were 12 successful out of 13.

So I looked at his Performance History on WIS.  In 89 seasons, he averaged 1 SB a year.  His technically best-hitting season, he was 12 of 21.

Now granted, I didn't expect to crank his Stolen Base Aggressiveness up to "5" and expect 30 SB from him.  But I do reasonably expect to get about 75-80% success rate on about 150% of his real-life attempts.

So I am a little perplexed here.  Are these odd results due to WIS accepting his real-life total of 13 attempts as being too few within the game engine context to warrant him as a high-percentage successful basestealer?  Again, I'd think over a normal Open League season, he should steal around 15 out of 20 bases if put on "5" aggressiveness. What's your opinions?

I think you identified the problem yourself.  Thirteen attempts is too few for SIM to consider him a base stealer regardless of percentage.  I think the cutoff for SIM is 15 attempts, but someone more knowledfgeable than me can weigh in here.  Plus they looked at that bleeding abscess in his hip come September of `61 and they said, "Nah, he's not gonna run."

I don't know if 15 is a hard and fast rule (I expect it's actually based on SBA/100SBO) but it's around there. So yeah, even if you set him to 5, he isn't going to exceed his RL totals by much, and might not even match them.

And, anecdotally, I also think his success rate won't be as good as a guy who was 24 out of 26. Maybe it's because he's 12/13 but his speed rating is low.

I just finished a season with Chase Utley 2009 (RL 23 out of 23, speed 74) and he was 16 out of 23 on the season, set to 5 all year.

And... Jayson Werth 2010, 13/16 on the year, set to 4 all season, didn't even attempt a steal.

For comparison's sake, Jimmy Rollins 2007 (41 out of 47, 91 speed) was 56 for 68, so he ran MORE than RL.

Thank you both for your insight.

Jfranco, those seasons you had with Utley, Werth and Victorino ... don't show any kind of game-mechanic pattern whatsoever.  At least not to my untrained eye.  Your assessment as to the 15 real-life attempts per season sorta makes sense.  But even those numbers seem subject to a big shift in combination with the player's Speed Rating.

I'm trying to think of how I want to word an official inquiry into WiS Support to explain all this, although it ain't coming to me at the moment.  :-P 

I think what you're driving at is how to weigh the following three factors -- 1) number of stolen base attempts 2) success rate and 3) speed.  I have no idea what formula WIS uses, and I doubt if they will give you specifics on the relative weight they give each of those factors, but I'd love to hear what they tell you.  Just to complicate matters, there are other factors that play in as well -- opposing catcher and lineup position, for example.  Sparky will run leadoff men more than players elsewhere in the lineup.  And Sparky will tend not to run even the fastest guys against the so-called A++++ arms.  For example, I sometimes use Johnny Roseboro `64, and the great thing about him is not only how many baserunners he cuts down (pretty close to his RL 60%) but how few baserunners Sparky even tries to run on him (much less than half the average, even with dialed up Baserunning Aggressiveness settings).  So the quality of catcher arms within your league will affect stolen base attempts as well, which is logical.      

I thought there was a thread on this a while ago...  Anyone want to top it?

thunder is on the right track. there is a sliding scale of how many times a guy will run with a "5" setting, from "not at all" to "more than he did in RL" - the determining factors are what he mentioned (speed, SBA/100SBO, SB/SBA) - SB/SBA, ie success rate, is tied to the catcher's arm. I'm not sure about the others.

had I known ahead of time that I'd be so curious about it, I would have made Werth a "5" as well.