While washing the dishes a few minutes ago I got to catch a half-inning of the Brewers/Rangers game on my iPhone.

What I saw made me wonder if the Rangers have a lot of team speed. I saw Julio Borbon reach on an infield single, where his speed caused Rickie Weeks to rush a throw that was a bit off-line to Price Fielder, perhaps making the difference. Rich Harden then sacrificed and nearly reached first base safely himself. Borbon was then thrown out attempting to steal third base. Yes he was out, but the fact that he attempted the steal at all was notable to me. Elvis Andrus singled and then motored home on a double by Michael Young, beating a nice throw originated by Ryan Bruan.

Anyway, this made me curious to see whether the Rangers have a lot of team speed. The first thing that pops into mind is stolen bases, although this stat is obviously a sideways-at-best look at team speed, since the manager's decisions on whether to attempt to steal has the biggest impact on team SB totals.

From the 2010 AL standard batting page, we can quickly glean their rankings in the AL for SB and CS:

I included 4 columns of interest. First let's look at the middle two: SB and CS. The Rangers have the 4th-most stolen bases in the AL and the 2nd-most times caught stealing. Their 66% success rate is among the worst in the league, with only the Orioles, Angels, and Royals trailing the Rangers. So this doesn't tell us a whole lot. Also note that they have an above-average OBP, suggesting they have more opportunities to steal bases. Finally the average of their batters is the 2nd-youngest in the league, a factor that also tends to increase stolen bases and stolen base attempts.

We can learn a lot more, I think, from looking at the 2010 AL Baserunning page.

I'm going to go through this table in some detail.

• The first column SBO is Stolen Base Opportunities. Keep in mind you can move your mouse over the column titles for their definitions. As you can see, the Rangers have had 854 while the league average is 856. So despite having a higher OBP, they have had essentially an average number of opportunities.
• I kept the SB and CS numbers here, as well as the SB% numbers that I mentioned above.
• BT refers to bases taken, such as by wild pitches, fly balls, passed balls, etc. Here the Rangers have 80, most in the AL and well over league average. This certainly suggests good team speed, but it may also relate to their high OBP and having a coincidentally large number of wild pitches and/or passed balls on which to run.
• The next column, XBT%, is the percentage of extra bases taken, such as when a runner on first advances to 3rd on a single instead of just to second. This number is calculated from all the columns on the right, which show the various situations. As you can see, the Rangers are above average here, behind just the Rays, Angels, and Twins. (Have you noticed that the Rays are good at everything???)

By no means is this a wonderful study I've done, but it suggests that what I saw in that half inning may be representative of the team on the bathpaths---pretty fast and pretty aggressive.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.