Article: Do The 2024 Cubs Need To Steal Bases To Be Effective Offensively?

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Last year, the Cubs were a very good baserunning team. Will that success and aggressiveness carry over to 2024?

Image courtesy of © Kevin Sousa-USA TODAY Sports

The 2023 iteration of the Chicago Cubs was one of the best baserunning teams in Major League Baseball. FanGraphs’ Base Running metric (BsR) takes the following into account as part of its calculation: 

• Ultimate Base Running (UBR – a measure of each baserunning event)
• Weighted Stolen Base Runs (wSB – the contributions of a player stealing bases measured by runs)
• Weighted Grounded into Double Play Runs (wGDP – essentially the ability of a player to stay out of double plays) 

Last year’s Cubs came in with a 7.8 BsR figure, which ranked ninth in the league. Narrowing the field to only National League counterparts, they ranked fifth. The team’s 140 steals ranked eighth among big league squads, with their eight-most caught stealing (34) easily attributable to that aggressiveness. They also hit into the second-fewest double plays (95), with only Pittsburgh’s 92 sitting lower. 

It made sense within the composition of last year’s roster. Nico Hoerner was a stolen base demon with 43 steals (fifth in the league), followed by Cody Bellinger’s 20 and Ian Happ’s 14. Miles Mastrobuoni (13) & Nick Madrigal (10) each hit double digits, with another host of players contributing a few swipes to the effort. With that group’s offensive contrast of on-base and contact ability against a lack of power and ending on the higher side of GB%, getting runners in motion was a reasonable tool for the team to generate offense. Despite minimal roster turnover, it’s a strategy that hasn’t carried over into the subsequent season. Not that that’s super unique to the Cubs.

As of this writing, the Cubs have just a pair of steals. Mind you, they aren’t trailing the rest of the league by a wide margin. A few clubs have just three to date. But none of those teams were as active on the basepaths as the Cubs were last season. They also have only two caught stealing, leaving very little indication of any aggression in that facet of the game thus far. 

This brings us to one important point and one important question: The point is that just because the Cubs aren’t attempting to get runners moving at the same rate as 2023 doesn’t mean they aren’t demonstrating quality on the bases. Our friend, Brett Taylor, over at Bleacher Nation, aggregated a few details about their baserunning performance to date. Those details include the fact that the Cubs are moving runners from first to third at the highest rate in baseball, in addition to leading the field in Statcast’s XBR comprehensive baserunning metric by a fairly wide margin (a measure by which they were tied with Atlanta as the league’s fifth-best baserunning team in 2023). 

The question is whether the Cubs must be aggressive on the basepaths to generate sustainable offensive success. Given the overall lack of roster turnover, this seems a valid question based on last year’s stolen base output. 

At a quick glance, however, steals don’t necessarily equate to more production. Not directly, at least. The top five teams in steals last year were as follows: Cincinnati (190), Arizona (166), Kansas City (163), Tampa Bay (160), and Cleveland (151). Those teams ranked ninth, 15th, 23rd, fourth, and 27th in the league in runs scored, respectively. Only Tampa Bay (fourth again) and Cincinnati (10th) sat in the top 10 in on-base percentage. Only the Rays were in the top 10 in hitting with runners on, as well. For those teams, it would appear that speed on the bases didn’t correlate with an increase in productivity. 

The Cubs' offensive success in the current season is not solely dependent on steals. They are in the top five, with runners on in wRC+ (140), K% (16.5), and BB% (14.2). They’re seventh in average (.290) and ISO (.193). Their ability to provide quality plate appearances with runners on and subsequently move those runners, especially given the first-to-third note provided by Brett in the above article, suggests that steals are not a necessity for them. Their strategy of working counts and working deeper into the lineup allows them to generate runs even without incorporating the speed element. 

The fact that steals are down across the league only furthers the Cubs’ case for not demonstrating the same aggressiveness as last year. Without a genuinely comprehensive lineup, steals are almost a futile endeavor for some clubs. A peek at the team's stolen base leaders over the last few seasons doesn’t present any real correlation with run production. Many of the frontrunners in that category are much farther down the leaderboard in runs scored. However, a starting nine that runs deep in their ability to turn in quality PAs will see runs manifest in a much more organic way. This is what we’ve seen with the Cubs in the early going. 

Does this mean the Cubs are content not to demonstrate aggressiveness in the longer 2024 term? Perhaps not. After all, their real go-getter in the SB game, Nico Hoerner, is off to a wildly slow start. Maybe once he shows up on the bases at a higher frequency, there’ll be at least a marginal shift. In the interim, though, I think we continue to see the Cubs play it as conservatively as possible in that sense, which seems to be…just fine. 

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