Today, we’re here to talk about Ryan McMahon, but before we can do that, we need to talk about Joe Kutina. Joe Kutina didn’t steal any bases in 1912. A 6-foot-2, power-hitting first baseman in his second season with the St. Louis Browns, that wasn’t necessarily his job. Kutina earned his spot in 1911, batting .374 with a .589 slugging percentage for the Saginaw Krazy Kats of the Class-C Southern Michigan League. He joined St. Louis at the end of the season, putting up a 96 wRC+ with three home runs in 26 games with the Browns. In 1912, his wRC+ dropped to 59 and he launched just one homer in 69 games. He also got caught stealing seven times.
I know that getting caught stealing seven times sounds like a lot, but things were a little different back then. In the 1912 season, 73 players got caught stealing at least seven times. Ty Cobb led the league with 34 unsuccessful steal attempts, and three other players also got nabbed at least 30 times. The difference is that Cobb and those three others combined for 203 successful steals. Kutina, once again, stole zero bases. That made him the first player in AL/NL history to get caught stealing at least four times without successfully stealing a single base in a season — or at least to be recorded doing so in that era of spottier record keeping. According to Stathead, over the last 112 years, just 216 players have replicated Kutina’s dubious accomplishment. Although that averages out to a bit below two per season, the distribution isn’t exactly even. We’re only third of the way into this decade, but unless the pace picks up dramatically, we’ll end with the lowest total since the days when Joe Kutina was lumbering around the bases with reckless abandon.
As it turns out, one of the changes wrought by the data revolution was an unwillingness to let players who were incapable of stealing a base keep trying and failing over and over again. This is why people don’t like analytics. So far this decade, Nicky Lopez is the only player who has accomplished the feat, somehow getting caught five times without a stolen base in 2020. He’d go on to steal 22 bases in 23 attempts in 2021, so I might have to devote another article to looking into how he managed to fail so prolifically, especially during a 60-game season. For today, however, our topic is the one player who has already entered Kutina territory this season. Here’s the current list of steal-less players who have been caught at least twice, putting them on pace to join the illustrious Kutina Club of Insistently Unsuccessful Basestealers. For entertainment purposes, I’ve also included their sprint speed and its percentile rank. Curiously, four of them are (or were) third basemen. And there’s our friend Ryan McMahon.
McMahon is nobody’s idea of a burner. Coming into this season, he had accrued -3.1 career baserunning runs. However, he was 24-for-36 in stolen base attempts, which comes out to a definitely-not-good-but-not-necessarily-disastrous 66.7%, and he’s stolen at least five bases in each of the past three seasons. This year, his 19th-percentile sprint speed, while not ideal, is his fastest since 2021. McMahon still has 102 games in which to steal a base and avoid joining Kutina on the graph above, but let’s look at what’s been going wrong so far this season. His first caught stealing came on April 9 against the Diamondbacks. At first blush, it’s hard to put too much blame on McMahon here. Gabriel Moreno has an excellent arm, and since this is a double steal, McMahon needs to make sure that Ezequiel Tovar is actually going before he commits. On the other hand, the first baseman isn’t even holding McMahon. He knows the steal is on, and he easily could’ve taken a much bigger lead. Moreover, his jump is truly atrocious. He doesn’t start moving until Merrill Kelly is well into his leg kick and Tovar is in a full sprint. This still frame tells you everything you need to know. Kelly’s left leg is at its apex. Tovar is already digging for third with his head down. McMahon hasn’t even taken his crossover step yet. His first step toward second won’t come until Tovar’s fifth step toward third. No wonder he’s out by a mile. He didn’t slow down noticeably, but it’s possible that he didn’t get up to top speed because he wasn’t expecting Moreno to go for the trail runner.
