Starlin Castro and the Odd Stat of the Day
If you’ve been reading my posts over the last eight months, you know I enjoy writing about quirky players, quirky stats and quirky stories. If you enjoy those too, read on. If not, read on anyway. You might find this one interesting.
Monday afternoon, Matthew Leach, a terrific national baseball writer for MLB.com, tweeted: “Starlin Castro: more CS than BB. Guessing not many guys have kept that up over a full season.” Good guess. Not many have.
Let’s look first at Castro’s numbers.
In his first 211 plate appearances of the season, Castro’s drawn only four walks. Four. That’s a 1.9 percent walk rate. Only Clint Barmes of the Pirates has a lower walk rate among qualified position players, at 1.3 percent.
Two years ago, during his rookie season, Castro had a 5.7 percent walk rate. That dropped to 4.9 percent in 2011. We would expect Castro’s walk rate to rise from 1.9 percent as the season progresses, in light of his career numbers and the fact that it is pretty hard to play everyday in 2012 and maintain a walk rate below two percent.
Castro’s stolen fourteen bases so far this season and been caught attempting to steal five times. That’s a 73.7 percent success rate, up from  a 71.9 percent success rate in 2011, and a 55.5 percent success rate in 2012. We shouldn’t be surprised to see Castro end the season with a success rate somewhere in the range of 70-75 percent, given his career numbers and the likelihood that his base-stealing skills are improving.
That’s four walks and five caught stealing for Castro so far this season. If his walk rate increases just a bit — to, say 2.5 percent — and his stolen base percentage stays constant or improves, Castro is unlikely to join the short list of players who were caught stealing more times than walked over a full season. I’m defining “full season” as having at least 502 plate appearances.
Here’s the list:
| Player | Year | CS | BB | SB% | BB% | OBP |
| Ozzie Guillen | 1991 | 15 | 11 | 58.3 | 2.0 | .284 |
| Ozzie Guillen | 1989 | 17 | 15 | 68.0 | 2.4 | .270 |
| Damaso Garcia | 1980 | 13 | 12 | 50.0 | 2.1 | .296 |
| Garry Templeton | 1977 | 24 | 15 | 53.8 | 2.3 | .336 |
| Shano Collins | 1922 | 9 | 7 | 43.8 | 1.4 | .289 |
| Dave Robertson | 1916 | 17 | 14 | 55.3 | 2.3 | .326 |
| Hy Myers | 1915 | 22 | 17 | 46.3 | 2.6 | .275 |
| Art Fletcher | 1915 | 18 | 6 | 40.0 | 1.0 | .280 |
| John Leary | 1914 | 15 | 10 | 37.5 | 1.8 | .282 |
| Buck Weaver | 1912 | 20 | 9 | 39.4 | 1.6 | .245 |
| Hal Chase | 1912 | 22 | 17 | 60.0 | 3.0 | .299 |
The first thing you notice is the 55-year gap between Shano Collins, who was caught stealing more than he walked in 1922, and Garry Templeton, the next most recent player to accomplish the feat, in 1977.
Why the long gap? One possible explanation is the lower walk rate league-wide in the 1912-1922 period — only 7.6 percent on average — than in the period from 1923-1976. In those 54 seasons, the lowest league-wide walk rate was 7.6 percent in 1968 and the highest was 10.4 percent in 1948. From 1977 to this season, the league-wide walk rate has been between 8.1 (in 1988 and this season) and 9.6 percent (in 2000).
The second thing you notice is the stolen base rates. All of these players were successful in their steal attempts far less frequently than Starlin Castro has been this season. Only Ozzie Guillen’s 68 percent stolen base rate is close to Castro’s current clip of 73.7 percent.
The third thing you notice is the on-base percentages for the players. Only two players had OBP above .300. Sure, these players had low walk rates, but they also didn’t hit their way onto base much either. And yet, when they did get on base, they tried to make the most of it with steal attempts. After Tuesday’s action, Castro’s OBP is at .322.
More caught stealing than walks over a full season. An odd feat, accomplished by only ten players since 1901 and twice by Ozzie Guillen. The odds are low that Starlin Castro will become the eleventh player on the list but with quirky stats like these, you never know.
He’s drawn fewer BB than Ian Kennedy (in 20 PA)
I saw Starlin playing catch with A Soriano pre-game the other day… Soriano is supposedly “a mentor” to him. My guess is that Castro won’t walk again the rest of the season.
Was interesting at today’s game, since Soriano took two walks. I was very confused. Then again, it was just odd in general, with Dempster getting an RBI hit, not a sac bunt and Darwin Barney hitting a walk-off homer.
This board is focusing on his flaws a little bit too much. Starlin was called up in 2010. Since then he’s 8th in WAR among shortstops, and he’s 2 years younger than anyone ahead of him on that list. I’ll take him at his salary, that’s for sure.
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=ss&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=8&season=2012&month=0&season1=2010&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&players=0
granted, it’s an article about his flaws, but still. he’s a top ten ss at a time when most players are still in the minors.
This is awesome. Well done.
I think it’s absolutely awesome that Ozzie Guillen holds the top two seasons on this list. Clearly as a manager he wants every single player to emulate his, uh, “skills.”
I, too, LOLed at this.
I by no means am a Guillen apologist (I hope those don’t exist), but to say that he wants his players to emulate his skills is something. If this were true, every great player would make a great manager because his players would try to emulate his greatness.
Yeah, I mean, some comments are meant in jest dude.
I wonder how many ball four/wild pitches Ozzie Guillen swung at in his career. As I recall, even at a young age, that number was massive.
One reason for the long gap is that CS fell by about three-quarters in the ’20s – by 55% from 1925 to 1926 alone – and stayed low for a long time. In fact, Templeton’s year, 1977, had (at the time) the highest CS rate since 1925.
Yup, a lot of people forget that the SB was mostly abandoned for a long time until Aparicio brought it back. All things being equal, less SB = less CS.
And as others have noted, it’s kind of ironic that the guy with the terrible SB% and terrible BB%, is now a manager.
It’s probably no coincidence that the W Sox won the World Series in ’05 with a team that relied tremendously on pitching, had a very stable defense, and was most aggressive on the base paths.
What are the chances his UZR numbers go south by years end? I’ve always been on the “its dumb to qualify performance with age, so Castro is overrated as of now” wagon. But if he can maintain acceptable defense for the rest of the season, a wRC+ hovering around 100 won’t be too awful.
He would still be overrated until proven otherwise though.
its fucking uzr, what do you think
nice.
Having more caught stealings than Bases on Balls is a sabermetric nightmare. I would like to see the incredibly negative shift in WPA these two numbers cause for each player. I’m ging to guess that in every one of these instances (particurally since templeton’s 1977) you would find some incredibly low WAR totals for each player in the year in which each player accomplished this. Ozzie Guillen played for 15 years and had 17.2fWAR thanks only to excellent defense early in his career.
Except Castro only had that because he had virtually no walks. He was still succeeding in 75% of his steal attempts.
Someone in my league released Gordon, so I traded Castro for Choo, as I was in dire need for an outfielder, and figuring Gordon can do some of the same things as Castro, such as striking out a lot without taking a walk.
Opinions?
nobody here cares about your fantasy team
More like it was a question of relative values of Castro and Gordon. I like Castro, but he’s under-performing, and I hate the K/W.
You win the internet for that comment.
And right on cue, Castro walked today
Wendy, how about giving Jason Heyward the odd stat treatment next?
What this illustrates about Ozzie is exactly why Bonifacio was underrated by so many FG writers. You guys and Ozzie clearly do not see eye to eye on what makes a good ballplayer. Bonifacio is exactly the type of player Ozzie loves in large part because of the similarities to his own playing style.
Castro at one point this season had eight errors and four walks…