Click on Baserunning

I missed this before but James Click, who wrote an excellent piece on baserunning for the 2005 Baseball Prospectus, has added some additional research on the Baseball Analysts site recently.

In his article he takes a second look at whether particular hitters have a tendency to advance runners more or less than average. In his BP article he concluded that there really wasn't a tendancy based on season to season correlations - a fact he recounts in the recent piece.

However, he then gathers a larger sample size by making comparisons across even and odd years over an entire career. What he finds is a correlation coefficient of .249, not exactly strong but definitely moving in the right direction. His conclusion:

"Batters show a huge degree of variance from season to season when it comes to advancing baserunners more than the runners would advance themselves, but over a career, there are some batters who will move runners around the bases a little more often than their lighter-hitting counterparts."

Well done.