Cool to have speedy Campana having stolen a base and created a run yesterday. Really fun.
Lots of buzz on the speed, fastest since Lou Brock, talk like that.
Not to be a downer, but it's interesting that no matter how fast he may be, that Campana wasn't all that great of a base-stealer in the minors. This year in 30 games at Iowa, he stole only 8 bases. So it's not like a single is really as good as a double. If you're stealing a base only once every four games, that's not THAT big. Likewise he reached base at least 47 times (H + BB), 37 of those times reaching 1B. But he attempted only 9 steals. So it's basiclaly only about a 25% chance at the minors steal that he'll even try to steal when he's on base. Not quite like a walk is an automatic double....
In AA, he attempted to steal more frequently, and stole 48 bases, and attempted 68, so that's some serious volume. 68 steal attempts and he reached base 200 times, so it's still not much off from a 1-chance-in-3 that he'll try to steal. And as fast and quick as he may be, he succeeded at 70.5%. I think typically 67% is considered to be the break point for whether it's even worthile. So his stealing was barely useful, if at all, in AA.
My point is that if his whole value is primarily as a base-stealer, and he didn't steal very frequently in AAA and his stealing was barely useful in AA, that he might not steal very often and might not steal very usefully here.
Hope I'm wrong. I think stealing is one of the most fun and exciting plays in baseball, so even if a guy is getting thrown out 30% so that it's arguably useful, I still love to watch and want him to try every time. (We aren't contending anyway, so who cares how it impacts wins
) One of the reasons I love it is because you can anticipate it. A HR is exciting, but in the 150 pitches a team throws in a game, I can't totally hang on every one of them thinking it might be a HR. It's so rare and random. But when a volume base-stealer reaches 1B, it's kind of obvious: there's a fair chance he's going to try to steal. So then I want to watch every pitch, is he going to go on this one? But, if a guy only steals once every four times he's on 1B (Campana at Iowa), then the odds on any particular pitch aren't all that high and it might not be that worthwhile to stop everything to watch the next pitch.