I’m going to dispense with the clever introduction because this isn’t going to take a lot of convincing: The Tigers are not a good base running team. There are a lot of different components to base running and a few different ways to measure it, so let’s just do a quick summary.

Using FanGraphs’ Base Running Runs, the 2016 Tigers are 27th in the league. Using Baseball-Reference’s model, they are 25th. Using Baseball Prospectus’ method, they rank 29th. I know that many of my sabermetrically inclined colleagues like to argue about which site is better as valuing players, but this is a relatively unanimous verdict. The current team is not doing well.

But it’s not just the current team. The 2015 Tigers were the worst base running team in the league, according to FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference. Baseball Prospectus liked them a bit more and ranked them 29th. In 2014, the ranks were 26th, 23rd, and 11th (!). In other words, the Ausmus era Tigers have performed poorly on the bases. But again, you knew that.

Baseball Prospectus has a table that shows the club’s success at advancing in situations like ground balls, air balls, on hits, and on outs and the 2016 Tigers are bad in each category. This is not an inherently troubling thing. After all, VMart and Cabrera aren’t speed demons and you wouldn’t expect that they’d take a lot of extra bases. There’s a difference between slow and stupid, and that’s the question I want to explore.

If you look at the Tigers roster this year, you have a handful of capable runners such as Kinsler, Iglesias, Maybin, and Upton. Castellanos, McCann, Cabrera, and Martinez (2) are much less so. If this is simply a matter of the slow players failing to advance, you can put the “blame” on the front office for choosing to assemble a team that doesn’t run very well. If they are performing worse than their speed suggests, however, that’s an execution problem that needs to be addressed at field level.

So we know that the Tigers are not a good base running team, but what kind of a bad running team are they? From a stolen base perspective, they’re just fine, posting a 72% success rate in 68 tries. That’s just about league average and their stolen base runs at FanGraphs support that, with them sitting at -0.4 runs (zero is average). So when it comes to taking off on the pitch, we don’t see any problems. Additionally, they’ve been picked off or picked off and then caught stealing 17 times, which is below average but not significantly so.

If you look at their outs on the bases, they’re in the middle of the pack for outs at first and second, have the 8th most outs at third, and are tied for the 7th most outs at the plate. That’s not a terribly encouraging set of results, but they’re in the top ten in terms of OBP, so they do have more total base runners available to make outs. In other words, the Tigers are worse than average at making outs on the bases, but they’re below average rather than terrible.

Let’s put these two bits of data together by plotting outs on the bases against extra bases taken rate (all from B-Ref):

As you can see, the Tigers are the worst in the league in terms of XBT% but right in the middle in terms of outs made on the bases. It’s one thing to be the Mets, who are the far left dot at 37% and 27 OOB. A team that doesn’t make outs and doesn’t advance is a team that knows its limits. You don’t want to be in the lower right quadrant, like the Tigers and Pirates (35%, 44 OOB).

This is a rough sketch of the situation, but it does the trick. It’s not that the Tigers are particularly reckless, it’s that they are much more reckless than they can afford to be given that they are terrible at advancing. The value of taking the extra base is roughly half as valuable (+0.2 runs) as getting thrown out is costly (-0.4 runs), give or take depending on the base and situation. If you’re taking a lot of extra bases, getting thrown out isn’t such a big deal once in a while, but if you’re either stopping or getting thrown out, you’ve got a problem.

So this is partially on the front office for assembling slow players. But slow players typically have other good qualities, like being able to hit the ball into the shrubs. The problem the Tigers are facing is that their players are making too many outs on the bases given their number of successes. That’s a coaching problem. Ausmus has generally advocated aggressive base running during his tenure, meaning that he’s either actively contributing to this bad mindset or he’s just doing nothing to stop his players who clearly aren’t able to successfully advance on the bases. Either one isn’t good and it’s something that has to stop.

The Tigers have a very narrow path to a playoff berth and they need to save every run they possibly can. Hitting, fielding, and pitching are hard, but base running is a place where your opponent can’t force you to make a mistake. The Tigers need to be more conservative on the bases given their current personnel, and it’s Ausmus’ responsibility to make sure that happens.