Run, Bryson, run!
Whenever Statcast introduces something new for the public domain, there is usually a rush to see how it affects the team one follows. It’s cool to look at the leaderboards to see how baseball is quantifying how much better the best players in the game, but in the end, we’re looking at players in our region.
Statcast has now given us ways to see how good of baserunners the players are. We’ve relied on things like sprint speed, stolen bases and assumed stats from Fangraphs to tell us who the best are, but thanks to new released (re: newly public) data, it’s more easily quantifiable. This article here is the primer you need to move forward here, so best to peruse it before continuing. It can really be summed up with this part grabbed from the above article:
We’ve never had a Statcast stat to measure basestealing skill. Now we can see who has the right blend of speed, aggressiveness and great jumps to be the best at swiping bags.
Seeing the best baserunners by zeroing in on stolen bases is the goal of course, but baserunning as a whole is so much more. How well does a batter go from first to third on a ball to the right field and to the center fielder’s left? How about going from second to home on a single to anywhere in the field? Things like that will also still be incomplete until they can incorporate coaching tendencies like when a third base coach holds the runner, but it’s good enough to use now.
So, naturally, how good of baserunners are the Phillies?
At first assumption, Trea Turner would naturally be the first guess since he’s one of the fastest baserunners in the game. And in fact, were this to be a cumulative stat, Trea Turner has been the best baserunner since 2016 by baserunning runs.
Not surprising when you look at his stolen base ability and his sprint speed (though Billy Hamilton last played meaningful baseball in 2021 and is a mere 11 runs behind).
If we’re focusing solely on 2024 though, Turner is not the best baserunner by baserunning runs on his team.
That honor goes to Bryson Stott for the season, something of a surprise. If you’re looking at where Stott has the advantage, it’s in his superior season stealing bases with a team leading 32 steals on the year. Some, if not all of that superiority to Turner, can be explained by Trea’s tentativeness running the bases this year after having his hamstring act up on him midway through the season. He was clearly trying not to tweak it yet again, thus didn’t run as much or as well as he did in the past. It’s probably something that will change in 2025.
Another observation is Bryce Harper. We all love his aggressiveness in taking the extra base when it works. Knowing when to turn on the jets out of the box and try for a double is one of the things that endears him to the fanbase. The numbers say, however, that he is a below average baserunner, though just by a bit. That number is skewed a bit by his poor base stealing, not by how often he advances for that extra base. So, basically, that extra base Harper is trying to take? More often than not, he’s helping his team. Just start working on that base stealing skill, buddy.
On a team level, the Phillies had +6 baserunning runs, which was good to tie with the Tigers for ninth in the league. It’s been kind of known that the team was a good baserunning team for a while if we’re going by just the eye test, but this confirms it. What’s interesting is that they’re baserunning runs are based on their being able to take the extra base (+10) than it is how well they steal bases (-4). While they take the extra base when necessary, they’re just not that good of a base stealing team.
Always a good thing when we can use data to figure out and confirm what we think we see.