Prioritizing Steals in Drafts - Hoard or Punt?

Sam Chinitz analyzes how to draft stolen bases (SBs) for fantasy baseball - should steals be hoarded, drafted as part of a balanced plan, or avoided completely?

Steals are projected to be the hardest stat to rack up in fantasy baseball in 2021, and ATC projects only 24 hitters to eclipse the 20 stolen base mark this season. As a result, hitters who can produce on the basepaths have earned expensive ADPs, with two-thirds of the 24 hitters projected to steal at least 20 bases owning top-100 hitter ADPs.

But prioritizing steals comes at a cost. The average hitter projected for at least 20 stolen bases is below average in home runs and RBI despite their pricey ADPs, and some hitters (like Adalberto Mondesi) have expensive ADPs solely because of their dominance in the one category --  a phenomenon that doesn’t appear to happen with any of the other four main fantasy hitter categories.

So, should fantasy managers make targeting stolen bases an integral part of their draft strategy? I tested four simulated draft scenarios to find out.

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Methodology

Draft strategy depends somewhat on league size and draft position, but I held those variables constant for this analysis and ran through four hitter-only, player position-independent, 12-team mock drafts (10 hitters for each team) to determine the relative value of draft strategies built around hoarding or punting stolen bases. Each mock draft was bound by different strategy-determined rules that are outlined later in this article, but there are four important universal rules to keep in mind (where the controlled team is the only non-automated team and the team following the various strategies):

• The controlled team always followed the strategy-determined rules when making their pick.
• The controlled team always picked fifth in a snake draft. This is a random and arbitrary pick slot, but the consistency makes comparisons between scenarios more reasonable.
• The automated teams always picked the hitter with the lowest NFBC ADP (as of February 14, 2021) available.
• All stats are based on 2021 ATC projections unless otherwise noted.

The four strategies tested in this analysis were: hoard steals, balanced, punt steals, hoard steals/balanced. The strategy-dependent rules for each of these strategies are listed below.

Hoard Steals

The hoard steals strategy was designed to test what a fantasy offense might look like if the fantasy manager were to make their decisions almost exclusively with the goal of dominating their league in stolen bases. For the hoard steals strategy, the controlled team followed these rules when making its selections:

• No hitter can be drafted more than one round (12 picks) before their minimum NFBC draft pick.
• Draft the available hitter with the most projected stolen bases for the given pick range.

Balanced

The balanced strategy was designed to test what a fantasy offense might look like if the fantasy manager were to value each category evenly relative to their levels of scarcity. To determine how each category should be valued, I used a standard scores approach and ATC player projections for each of the five categories to create a set of hitter rankings. For the balanced strategy, the controlled team simply drafted the hitter with the highest total score available. 

Punt Steals

The punt steals strategy was designed to test what a fantasy offense might look like if the fantasy managers were to ignore the value of stolen bases entirely. The punt steals strategy used a similar approach to the balanced strategy to draft hitters, with the only difference being that the punt steals strategy only assigned hitters value for four categories (BA, HR, RBI, R) rather than all five, so stolen bases were removed from the valuation process.

Hoard Steals/Balanced

As will become apparent in the results section and as you might be able to tell from the methodology, the hoard steals approach is unrealistically aggressive in its pursuit of stolen bases. To achieve a more realistic strategy that still focused on leading the league in stolen bases, the controlled team followed these rules when making its selections for the hoard steals/balanced strategy:

• Follow the hoard steals strategy rules until the team is projected for a collective 100 stolen bases.
• Once the team is projected for 100 stolen bases, follow the balanced strategy rules.

Results

Hoard Steals

As I noted in the methodology section, the hoard steals strategy is too aggressive when it comes to targeting stolen bases. Looking at the results, the hoard steals strategy generated an almost comically dominant team from a steals perspective, accumulating a whopping 154 more steals than the next-best team! That dominance cost the team in every other category though, with the controlled team ranking no better than second to last in any of the non-steals categories.

Balanced and Punt Steals

Surprisingly (to me, anyway) the balanced and punt steals strategies yielded the same draft. That result may not hold across all pick slots and league sizes, but it does demonstrate how immensely costly targeting steals can be on the other four categories. Despite ignoring steals completely, the punt steals strategy managed to not come in last place for stolen bases and generate the league’s best overall team.

Hoard Steals/Balanced

As expected, this team still finished with the league’s most steals, but by a much slimmer margin than the team using the hoard steals strategy did. By focusing on steals, though, the team using the hoard steals/balanced strategy was relegated to mediocracy in the other four categories and only generated the fifth-best team overall. This result is a fairly damning piece of evidence against draft strategies that focus on targeting steals early and another example of the costly nature of one-dimensional, stolen-base-reliant hitters.

The Verdict

It’s important to note that this analysis shouldn’t completely close the door on draft approaches that target stolen bases in some capacity. In the interest of full transparency, there are two particularly significant ways in which this analysis falls short of being definitive. For one, the controlled team ignores positional scarcity while the automated teams implicitly take positional scarcity into account by relying on ADP for their draft picks. Secondly, the controlled team makes its decisions almost exclusively based on ATC projections -- the same projections that inform the team stats resulting from the drafts -- while the controlled teams don’t have that advantage.

Although the fact that the controlled team always picked fifth may have also affected the results somewhat, it's worth noting that only one of the non-controlled teams to rank among the top-three teams in stolen bases fared well overall. 

Overall, this analysis makes clear that targeting stolen bases early in drafts comes at an extremely significant cost. As a result, high-risk hitters who rely on stolen bases for their value (like Adalberto Mondesi) should be avoided except for in later rounds. 

With that in mind, I’m comfortable landing on the “punt” side of this debate based on the analysis presented in this article. That doesn’t mean that fantasy managers should ignore stolen bases entirely -- it probably makes sense to target cheap stolen bases later in drafts from players like Myles Straw if possible -- but stolen bases should take a back seat to the other four categories and are too costly to warrant a strategy built around hoarding.

Overall Verdict: Punt

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