Baserunning Skills Rating: What does it do? Does it do things?? Let's find out!

[Echo127]

I've never really understood what the "Baserunning Skills" rating is supposed to do in OOTP, so I did some experimenting this afternoon to find out.

I've got an OOTP "Test League" in which I've got 2 identical (cloned) teams. All batters for each team have the same batting ratings. All SPs have the same pitching ratings. All RPs have the same pitching ratings. I've tweaked the fielder's defensive ratings to mimic what a very good defensive team could realistically like. All batters have a "normal" batting profile as it relates to both pull-hitting and GB/FB ratio. Ditto for pitchers (OOTP says avg groundout% is 54%, so I set all pitchers to that #). I tweaked the "hits" stat modifier so that league-wide batting avg is ~.250.

With these two teams I can simulate large #'s of games in the "simulation module" to see how edited player ratings impact team results.
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Anyways, what I did is set the "Baserunning Skills" rating of all batters on Team One to 250/250 in the editor. Team Two's batters are all at 100/250. I then ran 5 sets of 10,000 games in the simulation module.

Results!!!
Base-running skill does not impact frequency of doubles, triples, or hits in general. Nor does it impact stolen bases in any measurable way. It does, however, impact runs scored. Over the course of the 40,000 game simulation, Team One scored 1.25% more runs than Team Two. Mathed out to the impact on a 162 game season, we're looking at ~17 additional runs scored. This suggests to me that the "Baserunning Skills" rating *only* impacts a player's ability to navigate the bases while another player is up to bat--e.g., tagging up on a fly ball, scoring from 2nd on single.

This is not what I expected. Realistically, baserunning skills should also impact the frequency of doubles and triples hit by a player, as it *should* encapsulate the ability to make a good slide to avoid a tag or make the proper decision whether or not to try to extend a single into a double or a double into a triple. But it does not.
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So... I also decided to do a test run of a team full of max-speed guys. I reset team 1's Baserunning Skills back to 100/250, and increased their Speed ratings to 250/250. Again, Team Two's Speed rating remained 100/250.

Results!!!
Speed does not impact total quantity of hits OR total quantity of XBHs....but it does drastically increase the frequency Triples. It appears that the total quantity of Extra Base Hits a player generates is based solely on the Gap rating... And every double or triple that a player hits is pulled from that pool. Oddly enough, this means that a fast OOTP player can *never* turn a single into a double with his speed. Over the course of all 50,000 games simmed, Team Two (the "control" team) made 9,395 triples on 76,098 total XBHs. Team One (the fast team) made 34,196 triples on 76,339 total XBH's. Over the course of the 50,000 game simulation, Team 1 scored 1.86% more runs than Team Two. Mathed out to the impact on a 162 game season, we're looking at ~25 additional runs scored.

Also surprising, is that the max Speed team didn't generate any extra hits in total. I fully expected that Team One would have a higher batting avg due to their ability to run out additional in-field hits, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
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But wait, there's more!!!
First of all, one caveat to the Speed Test results--Team One's run total was "artificially" depressed by by their horrendous stolen base record. I'm not going to get into my theories on stolen bases, but here's the results from one random 10,000 game sim, just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

Team One SB: 3239
Team One CS: 4043
Team Two SB: 1072
Team Two CS: 782
^^And those results are typical^^

Anyways, dis-regarding everything I just said about SBs...you'd expect that the High-Speed team would be more desirable than the High-Baserunning team. But despite consistently scoring runs at a better rate than the High-Baserunning team, that did not translate into any statistically significant improvement on their win total. Over 162 games, both High-Stat teams are expected to win approx. 83.5 games vs. the control team. This had me concerned that I was missing something, but I think it's just a statistical anomaly. After seeing that result I pitted a High-Speed team directly against a High-Baserunning team and found that the High-Speed team would typically score 600-800 more runs than the High-Baserunning team over a 10,000 game sim and also win a proportionally correct # of times more often.

Some of my data is saved here, if you want to take a peek: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CICl-0QyD04brYMOwQz_55kPTT5nF-oc/view?usp=sharing

[Havana_Jake]

Awesome research. This kinda made me sad though. I hope that future OOTP's iron some of this out. Speedier players should turn outs into infield hits and singles into doubles. They should also force more errors from infielders. More skilled runners should be able to stretch more extra bases. They should also make less outs on the basepaths. I don't like being reminded that this is a computer program and not real baseball!!