Carlos Gomez: 13 SB

Carlos Gomez stole two bases last night to give him 13 on the season before being carted off after getting hit in the head. The only updates I've seen have just said that he was OK afterwards, but I'm not sure if he's expected to miss any games. Anyways, I have a few days before my next final, so I found some time to waste today and I used it to compile some baserunning stats about Gomez.

I gathered the pitch-by-pitch data (from baseballreference.com) for all the times that Gomez has been on base thus far and compiled some statistics on it. I did this all by hand, so of course it could be a little inaccurate, but I did the best I could.

Gomez has been on 1st base 21 times this year with 2nd base open. Here's the breakdown of what has happened:

Steals 2nd base: 11 (52.4%)
Ball in play: 8 (38.1%)
Caught stealing 2nd base: 1 (4.8%)
Balk: 1 (4.8%)

Since two of those balls in play were first-pitch sac bunts, which means Gomez had no chance to steal, they shouldn't really count when trying to measure his aggressiveness. Using this data, we can see that Gomez has tried to steal 2nd 67% (12/18) of the times he's been on first with 2nd open (discounting the bunts and the balk). Something that I attempted to calculate as well was the attention paid to Gomez by the pitcher. In his 21 times on first base with 2nd open, there have been 26 throws over to first, 3 pitchouts, and the 1 balk. In total, pitchers threw 32 of 63 pitches (50.8%) for strikes while Gomez was on first. That's a low percentage, but it's way too small a sample size to actually say anything about whether he could have an affect on the pitcher's concentration, especially when the pitchouts are taken out and the strike percentage rises to 53.3%. In those 63 pitches, Gomez stole 11 bases, got caught once, and was running on a foul ball or ball in play 4 times. Obviously, some of these could be hit and runs, but since there is no way for me to know that, I'll just assume they were all steal attempts. In that case, he has been running on 16 of the 63 pitches thrown while he's on first base, which is 25.4%. If I had something to compare that to, it might actually mean something, but for now I'll just have to say that it seems very high to me.

As could be expected, Gomez has been much less active once he gets to second base. Here's what's happened the 14 times that he has been on 2nd base with no one on third (keep in mind that many of these occurred as a result of him stealing 2nd):

Ball in play: 12 (85.7%)
Steals 3rd base: 2 (14.3%)
Caught stealing 3rd base: 0 (0.0%)

As you can see, he is much less active. In addition, there have only been 3 throws over to 2nd base. I think the best way to compare pickoff throws is per pitch that Gomez is on base, in which the ratio is 0.41 throws/pitch for first base and only 0.04 (3/78) for second base. There haven't been any pitchouts with Gomez at 2nd either, and the strike percentage is slightly higher at 56.4%. Gomez did run once on a foul ball and once on a ball in play, which pushes his running percentage per pitch up to 6.4%, still much lower than 1st base.