In the Cardinals’ game Monday, the Dodgers picked off Jon Jay. It was the second straight game in which the Cardinals needlessly lost a baserunner (Matt Holliday was caught napping at second base Sunday night). In a season of forgotten fundamentals, how have the Cardinals fared running the bases?

First, let’s narrow the scope to only outs on bases and pickoffs. (The Cardinals are last in the major leagues in stolen-base percentage at a pathetic 58%. The good news is that they haven’t tried much, with the third-fewest attempts per opportunity.) We consider failure at stealing less of a mental blunder (at least on the part of the player) than getting picked off and thrown out stretching. Let’s start with outs on bases — we used Outs On Bases per Stolen-Base Opportunities (a decent way of determining chances):

The Cardinals are clearly better than average here. So what about those pickoffs?

Here, too, the Cardinals aren’t that bad. Now we don’t have an easy way of contextualizing those outs on bases or pickoffs (perhaps that’s an offseason project), which may help in understanding the actual impact of those plays, even if they haven’t happened all that often. As for pure rate of baserunning blunders, this doesn’t appear to be one of the fundamentals with which the Cardinals have struggled this year.

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, August 22nd, 2011 at 10:32 pm and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.