Using the Baseball-Reference.com link Dave gave in the first posting on this discussion you can go up a few lines from the “Leverage Index” numbers and see Ichiro’s stats in “Late and Close” plate appearances. “Late and Close” is defined as: “Late and Close are PA in the 7th or later with the batting team tied, ahead by one, or the tying run at least on deck.” We’re ahead by one, or tied, or behind by one or two runs.

These are the exact situations that I was looking for.

Here’s what the stats show. I took the total hits and subtracted triples and home runs (not much chance of a stolen base with either of those) and added in the base on balls, intentional base on balls, the hit by pitches, and the reached on errors to get an on-base total. Then I took the total number of stolen base attempts and divided by this number.

Ichiro tries to steal a base 14% of the time in these “Late and Close” situations. That’s about midway between his “Medium Leverage” and “Low Leverage” averages.

I wanted to compare him to other base stealers, so this morning (they don’t consider baseball statistics “work related” here, so I can’t see them at work…) I grabbed the stats for some of the leaders in the stolen base category from last year. I only had a few minutes before heading to work so I was only able to print out the stats for the 6 leaders and Ichiro. The names listed as last year’s stolen base leaders were Reyes, Ramirez (Hanley), Pierre, Roberts (Brian), Crawford, and Byrnes.

I ran the same percentages for these players and here are their stolen base attempts per time on base in these “Late and Close” situations:

Crawford – 35%
Reyes – 26%
Ramirez – 24%
Pierre – 23%
Roberts – 18%
Ichiro – 14%
Byrnes – 12%

These are lifetime stats – not a single season.

I think the numbers show that Ichiro is very conservative late in games. This very well might be a very good thing. I don’t know if he and Byrnes are the smart ones and the others are costing their teams runs instead of gaining runs by their impetuosity.

Here are the success percentages in these “Late and Close” situations for the various players:

Crawford – 87%
Reyes – 89%
Ramirez – 81%
Pierre – 72%
Roberts – 79%
Ichiro – 81%
Byrnes – 79%

And combining the two we get the percentage of time they successfully steal a base when they get on in a “Late and Close” situation:

Crawford – 30%
Reyes – 23%
Ramirez – 19%
Pierre – 17%
Roberts – 15%
Ichiro – 12%
Byrnes – 9%

So the bottom line is that if Ichiro gets on base in the 7th through 9th innings during a “Late and Close” game – he’ll steal a base about 1 time in 8 whereas Hanley Ramirez will steal the base 1 time in 5, Reyes 1 time in 4 and Crawford almost 1 time in 3.

I think these numbers support my observation that Ichiro is very conservative in close games in the late innings. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing would require additional research.

vr, Xei

You can make the claim that he does affect the game when he is on base … but he sure doesn’t the way some of the top base stealers do. I just think with all the singles he hits, he should be stealing more. Henderson used to turn a walk into a triple on a regular basis.. now I know Ichiro isn’t that fast.. but he’s fast enough.

Also, maybe they were criticizing Ichiro last year, when his leverage splits were:

High — 5 SB, 4 CS
Medium — 20 SB, 3 CS
Low — 12 SB, 1 CS

For reference, the LI cutoffs at B-Ref are:
High >1.5
Medium .7 to 1.5
Low <.7

20% of PAs are in the High category and 40% are in each of Medium and Low. Since the categories aren’t equal, you need to use Dave’s approach of dividing stolen base attempts by opportunities. Here’s a shortcut, because i don’t have opportunities: just double the high-leverage SB attempts:

High – 18 (9*2)
Medium – 23
Low – 13

Ichiro didn’t steal when it didn’t matter. And it did hurt that he was only 5/9 in High LI situations.

*****

There are many high-leverage situations when the break-even SB-rate is very low, maybe 60%. In low-leverage situations, it might be more like 90%.

I’m pretty sure none of them post here.

I recently took a look at stolen base attempts in the ninth inning, using WPA, to assess the value of various stolen base attempts in the ninth. It turns out that in the 9th inning of a close game, you don’t need to be nearly as good a base stealer as you do typically in order for get an advantage from attempting to steal

Really nice stuff. I like how it takes a more detailed look at specific score/out/men on base situations, rather than doing what most analysis of stolen bases that I’ve seen does, namely treat all base stealing situations as if they’re the same.

It’s similar to the overly blanket criticism of sacrifices. Somewhere I read something similar to your analysis except applied to bunts, exploring what are the situations when it does make sense to sacrifice — this might’ve been in Tango/Dolphin/Lichtman’s excellent “The Book”.

And there are reliably documented cases of more runners getting thrown out against left-handed pitchers. The chances for success go demonstrably down. Ichiro is well aware of this.