Sam Greene/The Enquirer-USA TODAY NETWORK
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Ryan McMahon’s first stolen base of the season. McMahon, whose sprint speed was recently downgraded from the 19th percentile to the 18th, managed that first bag by way of a delayed steal. By completely dismissing McMahon as a threat, the Pirates presented him with a perfect storm of opportunity. He took an enormous lead off third base because no one bothered to hold him on, and he waited until catcher Yasmani Grandal unleashed a lollipop back to the pitcher, then waltzed home.
Where did McMahon, who had been caught stealing four times to that point in the season, get the idea for such a brazen daylight robbery? Probably from Garrett Stubbs, who had executed the same move just a few weeks prior, stealing third base right from under McMahon’s nose. Stubbs didn’t get the same gargantuan lead that McMahon did, nor did he get to take advantage of a catcher’s big, slow rainbow tosses back to the pitcher. He simply went because he saw that catcher Jacob Stallings was paying him no attention whatsoever.
On Monday, the Rockies were involved in yet another delayed steal. After walking in the bottom of the second inning, major league stolen base leader Elly De La Cruz somehow waited two whole pitches before taking off for second as Elias Díaz tossed the ball back to Ryan Feltner. This latest delayed steal was very different from the first two. McMahon is extremely slow — and Stubbs, while not slow, is a catcher — but everyone in the ballpark was aware that De La Cruz would likely try to take second. Both broadcast crews were talking about the threat of a steal and both feeds made sure to cut to shots of De La Cruz’s lead.
While Díaz has one of the quicker arms in the league, Feltner is extremely slow to the plate. He has allowed 20 stolen bases this season, second only to Corbin Burnes with 24. Díaz stared De La Cruz down before returning the ball to Feltner after the first pitch, and Feltner attempted a pickoff before delivering the second pitch. None of that mattered against a threat like De La Cruz, but I still found it surprising that he opted for a delayed steal considering that with a pitcher like Feltner on the mound, a conventional stolen base attempt was more or less a sure thing. De La Cruz, being De La Cruz, stole third base four pitches later; then one pitch after that, he was caught stealing home on a first-and-third steal attempt because Díaz (legally) blocked home plate.
Sam Miller wrote about the rise of first-and-third steals back in February and then again this weekend. “As long as I’ve been baseballing,” he wrote, “the first-and-third situation has been what separated the pros from the amateurs.” That’s no longer the case. Sam calculated that in May and June, the runner on first took off roughly 14% of the time, compared to 10.1% in 2023 and 6.6% in the 2010s. After watching all of those plays, he concluded that defenses still aren’t really sure how to handle that situation.
Much like first-and-third steals, delayed stealing has historically been reserved for amateur ball. Because it’s a difficult thing to search for, I’m not sure whether they’ve been happening more often too or whether I just happen to have noticed a cluster. Either way, this cluster made me wonder whether baserunners should be pulling this move more often. After all, the three that we’ve seen could not have been any easier. Only one of them even drew a throw, and that was a play when everyone knew a stolen base attempt was likely. It’s true that McMahon’s steal of home came when nobody was paying him the slightest attention and the catcher returned the ball to the pitcher like a grandfather pitching horseshoes, but Stubbs isn’t exactly a burner either, and his came on a normal throw from the catcher, following a pitch where both the pitcher and the shortstop were making a real effort to keep him from getting too big a lead. Maybe this is easier than we realize.
In order to get a sense of how often these opportunities are presenting themselves, I went through footage of every game from Monday night, gauging how attentive the catchers were when they returned the ball to the pitcher. Where possible, I chose situations where the baserunner possessed enough speed to be of concern. The primary method for a catcher to ensure the runner doesn’t attempt a delayed steal is to simply glance their way immediately after receiving the pitch. Most of the time, this move is perfunctory, and it consists of nothing more than a slight glance. From the looks of it, the motion is so automated that I doubt the catcher would register that anything was wrong even if the runner were testing the limits of their secondary lead and edging toward the next bag. However, a few catchers really did take the time to make their point. It’s just an extra quarter of a second or so, but I suspect that makes a world of difference. Nothing makes you feel quite so guilty as the sensation of being X-rayed by a pair of particularly suspicious eyes. Ryan Jeffers, Joey Bart, and Bo Naylor all took that extra beat just to make sure that the base-stealing threats on first felt the fear of God. Most impressively, Detroit’s Jake Rogers not only stared down the runner but fired a fastball back to the pitcher. The runner he was so worried about? Naylor, whose 35th percentile sprint speed makes him faster than McMahon in the same way that a turtle is faster than a rock that looks like a turtle. That left a few catchers who really didn’t look over at the runner at all. Logan O’Hoppe, Keibert Ruiz, and Willson Contreras never so much as glanced at the runner, and Martín Maldonado combined that indifference with a rainbow toss that took 1.3 seconds to go from his hand to Chris Flexen’s glove. Even a rock that looks like a turtle could have swiped the next bag in that situation.
This was a small sample and an extremely unscientific study, but it does seem like the catchers were split into three roughly even-sized groups: Those who really did pay attention to the runner, those whose attention seemed largely performative, and those who paid no attention to the runner at all. As Stubbs showed us, it’s possible to run on the throw when the catcher falls into either the second group or the third, and it doesn’t take top-end speed. If swiping bases this way were to become more common, just like the first-and-third steal play, then catchers would surely grow more vigilant, but that clearly hasn’t happened yet.
The obvious risk here is that the catcher will recognize what you’re trying to do, and your goose will be cooked. Not only will you be out by a mile, you’ll be embarrassed, and that can be a powerful deterrent. However, there are a few real benefits to stealing this way. First, you’re not distracting the batter during the pitch. Second, catching the runner requires a relay. The pitcher and infielder need to recognize what’s happening, then the pitcher needs to turn and fire a strike to the infielder, who needs to get there in time to place a tag. Third is the element of surprise. The pitcher needs to get over their shock, and pitchers are notoriously sketchy when it comes to throwing to a base to catch a runner rather than executing a pitch. More importantly, you can pick your spots based on what the catcher is doing. De La Cruz can run pretty much whenever he wants, but McMahon and Stubbs were taking advantage of patterns that they’d recognized several pitches earlier, situations that sure seem to happen pretty frequently.
The wildest part about McMahon’s steal of home had nothing to do with him; it was the fact that even after the play, Grandal continued lobbing the ball back…
