Hitters Losing Speed
I provide a list of players who lost speed in 2024 with an eye on finding some "steals fades" for 2025 drafts.
If you want one data point to help you determine how many bases a certain guy can steal in the upcoming MLB season, you should probably use what they did last year. But if you want ANOTHER data point, you can use their home-to-first time. This gives you a good idea about how fast a player can run 90 feet.
I will start by giving you the distribution details so we can know generally what is fast and what is slow. Here’s the distribution data in the form of a histogram.
That’s cute, but the raw numbers are more helpful. I will also put a name of a well-known player that matches each category:
Minimum: 4.06 (Ji Hwan Bae)
25th Pct: 4.35 (Mike Trout)
Average: 4.48 (Mike Tauchman)
75th Pct: 4.61 (Hunter Renfroe)
Max: 5.08 (Yasmani Grandal)Standard Deviation: 0.19
That standard deviation is the difference between Corbin Caroll and Cedric Mullins. There are five standard deviations between the max and min and 1.4 standard deviations between the 25th and 75th percentiles. The best way to use that number is as a gauge of who lost a lot of speed. If you dropped 0.15 or more on your number in 2024, you really slowed down.
I will share with you the full data and a new Tableau dashboard below the paywall, but first, I’ll hit some of the names that standout most to me in the data.
Slowed Down Standouts
Comparing 2022-2023 home-to-first time with 2024.
Bo Naylor (4.34 → 4.52)
Tyler O’Neill (4.32 → 4.50)
TJ Friedl (4.27 → 4.44)
Ronald Acuna Jr. (4.31 → 4.46)
Jo Adell (4.31 → 4.46)
Steven Kwan (4.19 → 4.33)
Those six are the guys who are getting drafted in standard(ish) leagues this year who lost more than 0.15. Here are some more names that lost at least 0.1 on their speed mark:
Adley Rutschman (4.41 → 4.54)
Christopher Morel (4.40 → 4.53)
Noelvi Marte (4.30 → 4.43)
Freddie Freeman (4.51 → 4.63)
Brenton Doyle (4.23 → 4.34)
Jorge Polanco (4.26 → 4.36)
Nolan Schanuel (4.37 → 4.47)
Some of these guys are young. There are more ways to lose speed than just by getting old. Maybe they were dealing with some injuries, maybe it’s a sample size issue, or maybe it had something to do with effort. I can’t say for sure.
I would not react very much to any of this. The cases where I would react would be the older players who you had previously depended on for steals in the fantasy game.
Starling Marte is a good example of this, although this began a few years ago with him.
The drop came after 2019, and then we saw further drops after 2021 and 2022.
You will be best served by diving into the full data by yourself, but before we get to that - here are your speed increases from last year. I filtered out the super slow guys who we don’t care about because they’re still nowhere near fast enough to steal any bases.
It’s most interesting to see names like Jurickson Profar, Jordan Westburg, Anthony Volpe, Brent Rooker, Rafael Devers, Tyler Soderstrom, Cody Bellinger, and Jonathan India there. Maybe those are guys who can keep up some of the steals increases they had last year, or maybe they’re set to steal a few more bags this year if they can stay healthy.
Now we’ll put up the paywall, and I’ll share the links to the goods with the paid subscribers.