The Early Returns on Steals Are Overwhelming

When MLB added a pitch clock for the 2023 season, stolen base fans started salivating immediately. They had good reason to: when the pitch clock and its associated limit on pickoffs came to the minor leagues, stolen bases exploded. As spring training progressed, the evidence mounted: teams would steal more often, and they’d be successful doing it.

Still, there was no knowing how cleanly those warmup game stolen base numbers would translate into regular season games. Maybe teams were getting their stolen base practice in so that they could use it in key spots but would dial their aggression back when faced with the prospect of making real-life, actual outs on the basepaths. Maybe pitchers were sandbagging their best moves in anticipation of over-eager base stealers and would start racking up free outs left and right starting on Opening Day.

With the first 50 games of the seasons in the books, it’s safe to say that steals are here to stay. Just watch the Orioles, as Michael Baumann noted, and you can’t help but see it. To get an idea of just how much things have changed, I came up with a straightforward idea: compare the first 50 games of this season to the first 50 games of last year. Figuring out the right sample to compare to is always tricky, but one way to get around that is by simply looking at the start of each season. Against that backdrop, a huge change in stolen base rate probably means something.

And oh yes, the change in stolen base rate is huge. In the first 50 games of the 2022 season, teams stole 33 bases on 47 attempts, getting picked off four times. That was a slow start to the year, and both stolen base attempts and success rate ticked up slightly as the year went on, to just over one steal per game. This year, the first 50 games have featured 70 successful steals already, more than double last year’s rate.

The 2022 season saw the second-highest stolen base success rate of all time at 75.4%, a hair behind 2021’s mark of 75.7%. Counting only getting caught stealing as a failure and ignoring pickoffs, the league started last season with reduced efficiency, stealing at a 70.2% clip. This year, it seems clear that we’ll set a new record. Those 70 successful steals stand against only 14 times caught stealing, the same number as last year. That works out to a whopping 83.3% success rate, on pace to shatter the old efficiency record. Teams are running far more often, and they might still not be running enough.

At only 50 games into the season, it’s far too soon to say whether this new pace is here to stay. But if you’re a fan of the go-go 1980s, it’s worth noting that this year’s 1.4 successful stolen bases per game would look right at home in that decade, when steals per game bounced around between 1.4 and 1.7. If this year’s success rates are to be believed, teams should start stealing more frequently, and the top end of that range might be in jeopardy.

Who’s doing the stealing this year? It’s still mostly the fastest players: The average sprint speed of successful stealers, weighted by the number of bases they’ve stolen this year, is a robust 28.4 ft/sec. That’s actually faster than the average base stealer in the first games of last year. That’s not to say that slower players aren’t stealing, though: Five runners who top out below 26 ft/sec have stolen bases this year already. That compares to exactly zero slower gentlemen in those first 50 games last year, though Paul Goldschmidt stole bases in both samples and is somehow faster than that minimum cutoff.

In other words, the players doing the stealing look a lot like last year, only with the population broadened. The fastest players are still doing the lion’s share of the stealing. Corbin Carroll was the fastest player in baseball last year, and he stole three bases last night. Jorge Mateo has four bags already. Sure, the Brandon Crawfords of the world have snuck steals in here and there, but there’s hardly been an avalanche of plodding runners. This trend will be worth keeping an eye on as the season goes on, but for now, the new rules seem to be making everyone steal more at a roughly proportionate rate.

All these steals put a premium on both pitchers who are quick to the plate and catchers with cannon arms. Some of the usual suspects have already shown up in the latter group. Sean Murphy, J.T. Realmuto, Willson Contreras, Nick Fortes, and Gabriel Moreno all showed off elite pop times (average time from the ball hitting their glove to reaching second base) in 2022, and they’ve all opened their caught stealing ledgers for 2023. Moreno has gunned down two runners without allowing a stolen base, in fact. If stolen base attempts continue at this current clip, big-armed catchers will carry a defensive premium.

On the other side of things, pitchers who are easy to steal on might be in for a long year. Of Carroll’s three stolen bases, two came against Noah Syndergaard, who is notoriously slow to the plate. Varying pitch delivery pace while staying in the good graces of the pitch clock will be hard enough for pitchers who have historically been tough to run on; those who struggled to control the running game will find themselves in hot water right from the start this year.

We’ll need more information to say where exactly steals will settle down, but one thing is clear: there are going to be far more this year than last year, and far more than any year in the recent past. I’m not sure how many steals it’ll take to lead the majors this year, but I feel comfortable saying that it’ll easily eclipse last year, and that the new rules introduced this year are having the desired and expected effect on the basepaths.