The team at Baseball Savant released an early holiday present yesterday: the baserunning run value leaderboards! Exciting stuff. Baserunning has always been one of those overlooked ways to generate value on the field, and it often plays a key part in creating marginal advantages that the best teams can use to lead them to victory. But good baserunning isn’t necessarily perfectly correlated with success; of the top 10 best baserunning teams in 2024, exactly half made it to the playoffs and four of the 10 worst baserunning teams played in October as well.
Making things more complicated, baserunning value has always been a bit tricky to quantify.