2023 MLB Stolen Base Investigation
I compare stolen base data from 2022 to 2023 to find the teams and players that changed the most
The talk of the town in the opening of the 2023 MLB was stolen bases. The rules changed and that set the stage for a massive uptick in stolen bases across the league. I am a few days early here, the regular season isn’t quite over yet - but I thought it would be interesting to look into this quickly. I was going to do a Twitter thread on it, but I figured it would be most effectively done here.
This post is totally free, but here’s my tip jar:
Overall Changes
36% more total steals with 3% of the season left to go. Attempts are up 32%, and success rate is up nearly six points.
Defining Terms
I will use stolen base attempt rate (SB Att%) in this post. The way I’ve defined this:
(SB + CS) / (1B + BB + HBP)
The idea is to isolate opportunities. It levels the playing field a bit because it’s not punishing hitters for not getting on base. The denominator is just the time you wound up on first base. However, it’s far from perfect. It does punish a hitter who ended up on first base while someone else was on second base, taking away from their attempt rate there even though there was really no chance for the guy to steal a base in that circumstance, but over the full season things should more or less balance out so this gives us a good enough sense of how badly players want to steal bases.
Team Level Changes
I suspect this is more personnel based rather than strategy based. The Reds had the biggest gain, for example, and that would seem to be highly influenced by the addition of Elly De La Cruz, who is second in the league in stolen base attempt rate at 47.3%.
Players Above a 30% AB Att%
Esteury Ruiz 67.2%
Elly De La Cruz 47.3%
Bobby Witt Jr. 41.5%
Willi Castro 39.2%
Ronald Acuna Jr. 37.7%
C.J. Abrams 37.5%
Ji Hwan Bae 36.8%
Corbin Carroll 34.4%
Brenton Doyle 32.5%
Wander Franco 32.5%
Jarren Duran 32.1%
Josh Lowe 31.0%
Jazz Chisholm Jr. 30.5%
The bigger takeaway here is that only four teams reduced their attempt rate this year as compared to last year, and 21 teams increased their attempt rate by more than a point.
Player Level
You may have missed it, but Willi Castro has stolen 33 bases this year as a part-time player. He’s made just 390 plate appearances and is in the top 10 in steals this season.
He sits atop the different leaderboard, going from a 15.9% attempt rate in 2022 to a 39.2% attempt rate in 2023. Here are all the players that went for a double-digit attempt rate increase:
The average increase was +1 point, and 149 of the 250 (60%) increased their rates this year.
Here are the biggest decliners:
Jon Berti’s 2022 season was pretty insane, so some natural regression was assumed there - but coming the whole way down to 19.1% is surprising. He did not have a starting job for most of the year here, so that may have played into it - but we don’t care about him for fantasy purposes anyways.
The real disappointments here are Adolis Garcia, Randy Arozarena, and Marcus Semien. Those guys were all top 30 or so picks and all have seen their stolen base totals decline.
Garcia: 25 → 9
Arozarena: 32 → 22
Semien: 25 → 14
The good news is that they all raised their home run output as well, so they didn’t lose much fantasy value due to this.
Other Notable Increasers
Francisco Lindor +8.6%
Nico Hoerner +8.2%
TJ Friedl +7.6%
Luis Robert +7.3%
Nolan Gorman +6.8%
Christian Yelich +6.1%
Xander Bogaerts +6.0%
Byron Buxton +5.2%
Jonathan India +5.0%
Christian Walker +4.8%
Julio Rodriguez +4.7%
Jack Suwinski +4.3%
Freddie Freeman +4.2%
George Springer +3.7%
Shohei Ohtani +3.6%
Other Notable Decliners
Tyler O’Neill -11.3%
Christopher Morel -10.4%
Ramon Laureano -10.1%
Dansby Swanson -8.2%
Bo Bichette -7.8%
Kyle Schwarber -6.4%
Aaron Judge -6.2%
Bryce Harper -5.5%
Ozzie Albies -4.8%
Leody Taveras -4.4%
Seiya Suzuki -3.6%
Willy Adames -3.2%
Ke’Bryan Hayes -3.15