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Which teams run the bases best?
Posted by John Dewan on Dec 16th 2015
December 06, 2006
In the newest edition of The Bill James Handbook, Bill James developed a new system for evaluating baserunning. It’s a plus/minus system that, in essence, tells you how many extra bases (above expected) each player has gained. For example, on average, baserunners go from first to third on a single 28% of the time. If an individual does it more often than that, he scores a positive. Other factors are involved as well and are fully described in The Bill James Handbook 2007 pages 291-295.Here are baseball's five best and five worst baserunners in 2006:
| Top Five | |
| Name | +/- |
| 1. Chone Figgins | +28 |
| 2. Chase Utley | +27 |
| 3. Mark Ellis | +24 |
| 4. Orlando Cabrera | +24 |
| 5. David DeJesus | +24 |
| Bottom Five | |
| Name | +/- |
| 1. Josh Willingham | -30 |
| 2. Adrian Gonzalez | -24 |
| 3. Mike Piazza | -24 |
| 4. Frank Thomas | -23 |
| 5. Jason Giambi | -22 |
What about from a team perspective? Here are baseball's five best and five worst baserunning teams in 2006:
| Top Five | |
| Team | +/- |
| 1. Royals | +55 |
| 2. Twins | +40 |
| 3. Angels | +22 |
| 4. Rangers | +21 |
| 5. Red Sox | +20 |
| Bottom Five | |
| Team | +/- |
| 1. Padres | -66 |
| 2. Giants | -30 |
| 3. Reds | -25 |
| 4. Cardinals | -22 |
| 5. White Sox | -19 |
It’s very interesting to see that we have very good and very bad teams on both lists. This is only a one-year sample, but I’m sure that in the long run the better teams run the bases more effectively than the worse teams. However, in the short run, it’s not necessary to be a great baserunning team to win a lot of games.
The Kansas City Royals, a notoriously poor hitting team of late, have been the best baserunning team in baseball in three of the last four years. As former light-hitting Royal Bill Pecota once said, “If you can’t do the big things well, you’ve got to do the little things to make up for it.”