It's something that's hard to miss if you're paying attention to leaguewide MLB trends.
There are dudes stealing lots and lots of bases who have never done so before.
For the sake of this discussion, we'll stick with three guys:
- Mets outfielder Juan Soto: 19 steals (previous career-high 12)
- Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor: 22 steals (previous career-high 10)
- Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh: 13 steals (previous career-high 6)
There's a month-and-a-half left in the regular season. These numbers are only going up.
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It's remarkable, really. Soto has always been an on-base machine but has never been inclined to run a bunch.
Naylor is the craziest, having already stolen 11 bases in just 18 games with the Mariners after being traded from the Diamondbacks.
And both Naylor and Raleigh are listed at 235 pounds. They aren't speed burners.
Instead, they're all taking a page out of the Paul Goldschmidt playbook: Stealing bases is less about speed and more about smarts.
If you pick the right pitch to go on (i.e. a breaking ball), and if you do it on a pitcher that's slower to the plate, and if you get a good jump, almost any MLB player can swipe some bags.
Soto, Naylor and Raleigh are just emphasizing that in a dramatic way.
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They're part of successful stealing teams, too.
The Mets are on an active streak of 36 consecutive steals without being caught.
Earlier this month, the Mariners had a streak of 20 successful steals in a row.
The irony: Analytics generally took away the idea of steals being important. Moneyball, for example, didn't like the idea of attempting steals and risking making that out on the bases after putting so much work into getting on base.
But three big strong fellas in Soto, Naylor and Raleigh are working in reverse of that trend. Who knew it'd take MLB's hulking sluggers to make stealing bases cool again?
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