Dr. Giganto

As many of you know, I'm a huge stat-nerd when it comes to baseball. One aspect of the game that I always thought would be really difficult to quantify is a player's base-running skill. After all, you'd have to look at play-by-play data for every game and see how often they advance tothir don a single, score from first on a double, tag up successfully on a fly ball, make outs on the basepaths, etc.

Fortunately, somebody decided it was worth looking at, and people have started looking at all the play-by-play data and using it to gauge just how good differnt players are at baserunning.

Baseballprospectus.com has the Top 10 and Bottom 10 for 2006.

Top 10:

1. Chone Figgins
2. Hanley Ramirez
3. Orlando Cabrera
4. Jimmy Rollins
5. Chris Duffy
6. Ichiro Suzuki
7. Willy Taveras
8. Chase Utley
9. Jose Reyes
10. Dave Roberts

Bottom 10 (starting with the absolute worst)

1. Victor Martinez
2. Javy Lopez
3. Magglio Ordonez
4. Jason Giambi
5. Pat Burrell
6. Paul Konerko
7. Jorge Posada
8. Josh Willingham
9. Bill Hall
10. Bengie Molina

Not many surprises here. The small, fast guys are at the top, and the slow catchers and firstbasemen are at the bottom. The interesting thing to note is that this measures runs added, and the difference between the best (Figgins) and the worst (V. Martinez) is only about 15 runs. (Figgins' baserunning added about 9.2 runs more than an average player would, Martinez's base-running caused about 5.7 less runs to score than a normal baserunner). A general rule of thumb is that every 10 runs adds about one more win to a team's expected win total. So, the difference between the absolute best and the absolute worst baserunners is only about 1.5 wins per year.