Let’s start the new era of Baseball with Matt with a banger of a post.
The single-season steals record, which was set by Rickey Henderson in 1982 with 130, is easily breakable if a player has the right skillset. That’s quite a hot take for my first baseball blog post in over a year, but I’m sticking with it! Don’t worry, I understand that a statement like that warrants an explanation, so hear me out.
It goes without saying that stealing bases is hard, but it goes without saying even more (great grammar, Matt) that the quintessential base-stealer has become obsolete in the 21st century. Major League Baseball has seen total annual stolen base numbers shrink significantly since the heyday of larceny that lasted from the 1960s to the 1980s, when Lou Brock, Maury Wills, Henderson, Vince Coleman, and plenty of others lit up the basepaths with stolen base numbers that would seem outlandish in today’s game. For reference, the top base stealer in 2021 was Starling Marte, who swiped 47 bags in an exemplary year on the basepaths for modern standards. In 1982, the year that Henderson broke the steals record, Marte’s 47 steals would’ve put him in a measly eighth place, right behind longtime Dodger speedster Steve Sax.
So, why don’t players steal like they used to? Well, there simply isn’t a need. In an era shaped by analytics, exit velocity and launch angles have become more conducive for run-scoring than literally and figuratively stealing runs via baserunning. Swing paths, spray charts, and “three true outcome” (home runs, walks, and strikeouts) hitting is the status quo, rendering most contact hitters and speed fiends out of a job. On-base-plus-slugging, or OPS, along with its league-normalizing sister stat, OPS+, are arguably more prevalent in the MVP conversation nowadays than the catch-all wins above replacement (which I personally could not care less about, but that’s a conversation for another day). There just isn’t a place in a modern-day lineup for your classic speedster, especially considering the updated lineup creation philosophy of batting the best hitter in a team’s lineup first, the previous spot in the lineup for your guy who steals bases like there’s no tomorrow (see any lineup card for the Angels and Yankees, if you catch my drift).
Still, despite less emphasis on base-stealing, you can make a strong argument for the Ichiro Suzukis of the world because no manager should want to get beat the same way twice. What I mean by that is baseball is a game of isolated strategy. Each lineup that one manager puts out is ideally the direct antithesis of an opposing pitcher’s strengths. On the flip side, each pitch in a pitcher’s repertoire ideally aims to maneuver around a hitter’s tendencies and, as John Mulaney might say, throw them off their rhythm. So, putting out a lineup with nine MVP candidates that each have no stealing ability whatsoever might hurt a team rather than help them because it’s easy to optimize a strategy against the same type of hitter nine times in a row. To some meatheads who might want to load a lineup with 60-homer sluggers first to ninth in the order, just look at Clayton Kershaw’s 12-6 curve, and then come talk to me.
If we want to talk about value, though, I understand why stolen bases have fallen by the wayside. In terms of run-scoring, the efficiency of hitting a home run is unparalleled compared to any other batting outcome there is. One home run is, well, one run. It's that simple. But things get interesting when you consider the amount of home runs hit by even the greatest of sluggers. Even if you take a 40-homer season, along with the surrounding stats that go along with that kind of a batter, you can steal the same amount of aggregated value over the span of a season, but only if you steal a lot. I'm talking one steal a game, which would destroy Henderson's steals record by at least 30 steals. So, from an analytical perspective, it would be worth it to break the record. But do modern-day players have the chops to do so?
It's complicated, but in my opinion, absolutely. There are three skills that come with being a good base-stealer. Two of them are obvious, while one is a bit of a read-between-the-lines type of skill. The two obvious ones are that you have to be fast and you have to know how to steal bases. You actually don’t have to be as fast as you might think, but you definitely need to know what you’re doing. Dodgers shortstop Trea Turner, arguably the “best” speedster in baseball in terms of wholistic batting (he won the 2021 NL batting crown with a .328 average and has averaged 34 steals a year from 2016-2021) has an average Spring Speed per Baseball Savant this year of 30.4 feet/second, which is second in all of baseball, and has 17 stolen bases in 2022. However, your current leader in stolen bases thus far through the 2022 season is Marlins infielder Jon Berti, who’s swiped an impressive 28 bags through only 58 games played, with an average Sprint Speed of 29.4 feet/second, good for 23rd-best in baseball. Kyle Tucker’s Sprint Speed is in the 46th percentile this year, yet he is 15 for 17 on stolen base attempts. A lot of the knowledge of stealing bases just comes from the analysis that’s available in the game today. Stolen bases are actually easier than they’ve ever been before because it’s easier than ever to learn when the best time to steal really is.
The third skill required to be a good base-stealer (and to have a shot at Rickey’s record) might not seem so relevant until you look at the stats of some of baseball’s best larcenists. Let’s look at Rickey Henderson’s last year in which he led the Majors in steals: 1998 with the Oakland A’s at the age of 38 (jeez, he was insane). In the same year when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa treated fans to one of the greatest home run record chases baseball has ever seen, Henderson was putting up an otherworldly season in an entirely different way. Sure, his 66 stolen bases were number one in the stolen base rankings, but do you know how many walks Henderson had in ’98? 118! The Man of Steal led the league in bases on balls in 1998, which is why his on-base percentage that year was an astounding .376, even though he only batted .236! You would never think of Henderson as a master of walks, yet his 2,190 career BBs are second on the all-time list!
So, what am I trying to say here (because Babe Ruth sits third on the all-time walks list, but he was too busy eating hot dogs to run the bases)? The third skill required for base-stealing is that you simply have to be good at getting on base, which gives you more opportunities to try to accumulate stolen bases. That’s why high-average hitters are associated with base-stealing: when you only have the power to hit singles, but do so at a high enough rate to stay in the lineup, the best thing for your team is if you could somehow end up on a base other than first. Being on first is infinitely worse than being on second (or third or home, for that matter). There’s the threat of a force-out at second, increasing the likelihood of double plays. And scoring a run is way more probable with a runner in scoring position than with a runner on first. Think about it this way: with a runner on first, a runner grounds into a double play and the hitter after that grounds out. No run scores in that inning. But if that first runner stole second and the next hitters still ground out, that could be a run if the runner on second advanced a base with each ground ball.
But Henderson’s ability to walk isn’t just a one-time mix of OBP and stolen bases. Joe Morgan of the Big Red Machine (and the king of advanced statistics 35 years before anyone knew what WAR was) sits fifth on the all-time walks list and eleventh on the all-time stolen bases list. Expos legend Tim Raines is fifth all time in steals and posted a lifetime on-base percentage of .385. These base-stealers (Hall of Fame base-stealers, I might add) didn’t just know how to get on base; they thrived on it, because they knew that once they were on the basepaths, it was game over for the other team, and that was going to be how they added value. That’s a key word in today’s game, so let me reemphasize my point from earlier. Stolen bases, when they come in bunches (like bunches of 130 or even 162), can add just as much value to a team as home runs can.
And so, we return to my opening thesis: Rickey Henderson’s stolen base record is easily breakable. Why? On-base percentage, walk rate, chase rate, and whiff rate have all been emphasized as attributes of good hitters in the Statcast era. All we need is someone who excels in those stats with above-average speed and a high stolen base IQ, and we have ourselves our next Henderson’s Monster. Sure, that combination might seem unicorn-esque, but think about it: most youngsters nowadays are pretty fast, learning how to steal bases is just a game of note-taking, data analysis, and practice, and no one is getting to The Show these days without “non-bat” on-base skills anyway. So, what’s stopping someone from becoming the next Rickey Henderson if they have the attributable assets and the trust and motivation from their manager to swipe bags left and right?
Is this a pipe dream? Maybe. Am I off my rocker? Based on my articulation, hopefully not so much. Is Baseball with Matt back? You bet your bottom dollar. See you next Saturday!
Comments