Stealing Bases Is Still Hard!

They’ve changed the rules to make it easier to steal bases. That’s not my conjecture. That’s just the truth. By limiting the number of pickoffs and setting a timer that baserunners can use to establish a rhythm, the game has changed completely. Obviously, it has. You knew this. There were 158 baserunners who tried to steal 10 or more times last season, up from 115 in the final year before the rule changes. Most of them were incredibly successful, too: Those 158 stole at an aggregate 80.4% clip.

That’s not all that interesting, to be honest. You knew it already. But what you might not know? Three baserunners apparently didn’t get the memo. Ryan McMahon, Nicky Lopez, and Vidal Bruján all attempted double digit steals and got thrown out more than half the time. I had to know more, so I tried to see what had gone wrong for these three would-be thieves.

One thing I learned right away: Not every caught stealing can be pinned on the runner. This one, for example, is just an inherent risk of a double steal:

Gabriel Moreno is an excellent defensive catcher, and he had this one sniffed out from the start. McMahon was dead to rights when he took off, and it’s less about him not getting a good enough jump and more about the deception required for a double steal. Maybe McMahon could have hit the turbo sooner, but to be honest, he doesn’t have a lot of turbo; he was in the 16th percentile league-wide in sprint speed. Sometimes, the back runner of a double steal just doesn’t survive.

I don’t mean to absolve him of all the blame, though. I don’t even intend to absolve him of most of it. Take this steal, in a bandbox in Mexico City with the Rockies already trailing by two runs. This isn’t your average caught stealing:

This time, McMahon beat the throw clean. He just couldn’t keep his body on the base long enough. It took replay – not my favorite way to catch someone stealing – but that sloppy slide inarguably happened. His front leg went completely airborne before his trail leg made contact with the bag, and slow motion replays made it evident. Every caught stealing looks the same on your statistical record, but this one, just like the previous one, doesn’t feel as cut and dry as “he can’t steal.”

Now this one? Yeah, don’t do this:

That was four days later. That’s awful, to put it plainly. He just misread the situation, took a wrong step, and was done. Then, after another three days:

After that, McMahon mostly didn’t try to steal for a while, aside from one memorable dash home. From May 6 to July 13, he attempted only three steals and was successful on all three. How did he break that successful streak? With one I can’t even classify as a pickoff:

Ew. And oh yeah, his sixth and final caught stealing of 2024:

OK, maybe McMahon just shouldn’t try to steal bases anymore.

McMahon’s lack of success seems to come down to an inability to read pitchers. But the other two players with low stolen base success rates went about their inefficiency differently. Lopez and Bruján are in the majors because of their speed and reaction time. Lopez once stole 22 bases while getting caught only once – in the big leagues, with the old rules. Bruján put up a 50-steal season in the minors. Is there anything to learn from watching speedsters fail?

Lopez’s first caught stealing came in his second game of the season, but his attempt died a hero; it was a first-and-third, bait-the-throw situation:

I know it counts against him on the back of his baseball card, but I don’t have a problem with this one, and I doubt the White Sox did either. His attempted steal led directly to a run. Many times, catchers won’t throw through to second base with runners on the corners because doing so gives the runner on third a better chance to score. That’s precisely why a runner on first base tries to steal in these situations. If the catcher holds the ball, the runner on first gets into scoring position easily; if the catcher throws through, the runner on third probably scores. That’s exactly what happened here. The White Sox were willing to trade an out for a run, and it fell on Lopez to do his part.

Lopez made some of his outs the honest way, by trying to steal and simply not being fast enough. In a six-day span, he got caught clean three different times. Here’s a representative example, the last of the three. As a reminder, don’t steal on Freddy Fermin. It’s never a good sign when the pitcher starts celebrating before the ball even reaches second base:

Now, that was a poor jump, but those happen even to good base stealers. The problem for Lopez seemed to be that he misunderstood his own speed. I mentioned that Lopez stole 22 bases in 2021, but he was a very different player that year. His average top speed that year was 28.2 feet per second. That dropped to 27.1 feet per second in 2024. And it’s not just top speed where he’s fallen off, either. Statcast breaks down competitive runs in 5-foot increments. Lopez took 2.86 seconds to run 60 feet in 2021; that was up to 2.94 seconds in 2024, nearly a tenth of a second difference. His 45- and 50- foot splits declined by a proportional amount. It might not sound like much, but that’s the difference in catcher pop time between an elite thrower and an average one.

After that embarrassing start – no one likes their body to tell them “buddy, you’re not fast enough anymore” – Lopez adjusted quickly. The next time he got caught stealing was nearly two months later. Then he went nearly another two months before getting caught again, but this one was almost certainly a blown hit-and-run:

Watch Lopez’s eyes, tracking the play at the plate instead of focusing on second. But there’s justice in the world. Corey Seager’s eyes were in the wrong place, too, and he just whiffed on a routine throw and catch. Because Lopez would’ve been out by a mile, that play goes in the book as a caught stealing with an E6, which allowed him to be safe. After that initial burst of actual factual caught stealings, Lopez recalibrated his own speed in his head, and then had a reasonable success rate. Excluding that blown hit-and-run, he attempted seven steals the rest of the year and was successful on five of them. Most of the time, he didn’t even draw a throw. In other words, Lopez had a rough adjustment from volume base stealer to opportunist, but after he re-taught himself the rules of the game, he was perfectly acceptable on the basepaths again.

That just leaves Bruján in our quest for would-be base stealers who simply couldn’t do it. I have to admit, I was surprised to see his name on this list. A huge part of his prospect pedigree was that he stole bases in great quantities in the minors. But that’s old news. In the bigs, Bruján has stolen 14 bases and been caught 13 times. His problem mirrors Lopez’s. He’s just not as fast as his mental clock tells him he is. On this play, the Marlins announcer cut in with, “Big jump!” to show how much of a head start Bruján got. Then he was out by a mile:

I slowed the GIF down a little bit around the time he realizes that this plan isn’t working so that you can see what went wrong. What went wrong is that he’s just not fast enough. Elly De La Cruz, a base stealer of similarly elite minor league pedigree, covers 45 feet in 2.23 seconds. Bruján is a tenth of a second slower. Over 60 feet, he’s 0.15 seconds slower. If you’re looking for some damning comparisons, Max Muncy and Brandon Lowe had the same 45-foot splits. Splits aren’t everything, and they’re measured from home to first so they aren’t a perfect comparison for what’s going on here, but you can see in this replay that his burst isn’t what you’d expect for an elite speedster.

The truth of the matter is that Bruján just doesn’t appear to be a great base stealer. Yes, he’s lost meaningful speed in the big leagues; he used to have De La Cruz-esque burst. But even when he stole a ton of bases, he didn’t do so with great efficiency. That 50 spot he put up in the minors? It came with 19 times caught stealing, a 74% success rate, and in A-Ball at that.

I watched every one of Bruján’s stolen base attempts to see whether he, like Lopez, altered his strategy as the year went on. He did – but by far less than Lopez. He also overslid into an out and slid directly at a few lunging tags. To make this out, Bruján both had to get a bad jump and then fail to avoid an extremely difficult, last-gasp tag attempt by Carlos Correa:

I thought, after watching these times where Bruján got caught, that his successful steals would look very similar. He’d have a so-so jump, but he’d just barely beat out the throw. But that simply wasn’t the case. Here’s a replay of his first steal of the year:

The camera didn’t pan to third because there was no point. Bruján had time to stop and take a selfie if he’d wanted to. With that jump, from that spot, and with that fumbled receiving attempt, there was no question of a close play.

Here’s another steal from the same game:

Again, Shea Langeliers had no chance. I’m not sure a bazooka would have enough oomph to get the ball to second on time there; Bruján had that one stolen by the time JP Sears finished his delivery. This one, months later, was more of the same:

I didn’t even show the opposing battery because they didn’t do anything meaningful on this play. Bruján just watched Drew Thorpe’s delivery for 10 pitches, saw a few pickoff attempts, and sauntered to third.

In fact, every single one of Bruján’s successful steals came without a throw. The new rules didn’t turn bang-bang outs into narrow successes. They turned some iffy spots into easy, automatic advances. In every single one of his uncontested successes, Bruján took advantage of pitchers’ hesitance to throw over and consistent timing. He was particularly good at it from second. But every time he miscalculated and ended up with a contested chance, he made an out.

Even in today’s game, it’s possible to be bad at stealing. But the three worst base stealers, at least by success rate, from 2024? They failed in ways that underscore how base stealing doesn’t work the way it used to anymore. Ryan McMahon? He just can’t help getting picked off. Nicky Lopez? He started the season running on everything and just wasn’t fast enough, so he had to change his internal clock. Vidal Bruján? He mixed together a little of everything. But even these three would-be thieves, the three guys at the bottom of the stolen base success rate leaderboard, succeeded mostly with uncontested steals. No one’s getting thrown out over and over again on close plays anymore. That’s just not how it works. These days, base stealing is all about avoiding the easy outs. Oh, and it’s also about not getting picked off, by Aroldis Chapman of all people, when you’re not even trying to steal. Take notes, Ryan.

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