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bags gALore

Posted: February 25th, 2013, 11:14 am
by AllstonRockCity
For the past 15 or so years (since I started playing fantasy baseball) the stolen base has always seemed to me to be more of a NL thing. Sure there have been some great speedsters in the AL during this time (Crawford, Podsednik, Ichiro, the Ricky, etc) but it always seemed concentrated amongst a few players who were specialists. I have always thought the NL had more guys that stole some bases as well as the specialist, but the AL was more the land of the SB specialist.

This past offseason has seen Reyes, Bourne, Altuve, Bonifacio and Vicotrino (though he's slowed down) all defect to the AL. That's 200 bags easy right there.

Assuming I am not just completely wrong about my beliefs, my question is: How does this affect the landscape of this year's AL only player pool? Does this 'influx' of speed devalue the SB in an AL only, or does it increase it? Does it not matter?

Put another way, I see at least 200 SB's here in the AL that weren't here last year. Its not like each of the 11 teams in an AL only is going to roster 18 of them. I would imagine that there will be a handful of team in each league that roster the lion's share of these 200 new SB's. How does this change things, if at all?

Discuss amongst yourselves.