Measuring Success
One of the difficulties in determining how good a player is at stealing bases is whether to judge the cumulative number of steals or the success ratio of steals to caught stealing. Noted statistician Bill James has argued that unless a player can steal a high percentage of the time, then the stolen base is not useful, and can even be detrimental to a team. A success rate of 67 to 70% or better is necessary to make stealing bases worthwhile.
Judging the base-stealing abilities of players from earlier eras is also problematic, because caught stealing was not a regularly recorded statistic until the middle of the 20th Century. Ty Cobb, for example, was known as a great base-stealer, with 892 steals and a success rate of over 83%. However the data on Cobb's caught stealing is missing from 12 seasons, strongly suggesting he was unsuccessful many more times than his stats indicate. Carlos Beltrán, with 286 steals, has the highest career success rate of all players with over 300 stolen base attempts, at 88.3%.
Read more about this topic: Stolen Base
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