MLB stolen bases are up, so where are all the new ‘burners’ on the basepaths?

Move over, 250-inning pitchers and .300 hitters, there’s another endangered species in baseball, one that most of us have never even heard of: burners.

“That’s what we call guys who are so fast,” explains Cleveland Guardians first base coach Sandy Alomar, Jr., “they can literally outrun the ball.”

You’ve probably heard by now: stolen bases are up in 2023. It’s a trend encouraged by bigger bases — which translates to shorter basepaths from first to second and second to third — and the pitcher’s limit of two disengagements (i.e. throw-overs) per batter. Entering May 1, the average stolen bases per game is 1.8, which is a jump up from last year (1.4) and 2021 (1.2) and the highest number since 2012. The stolen base success rate, 79.4 percent, is among the highest in recent baseball history.

But it doesn’t mean burners have returned. In fact, they may never. It will take much longer than a month to parcel out the tangible long-term effects of the new rules. It could take years, and in many cases an organizational overhaul in drafting and evaluation for burners to again infiltrate the game. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to decipher from what we do know.

Let’s explain.

Do we have any burners in the current game?

Rickey Henderson was a burner.

What about Ronald Acuña Jr., the current stolen base leader? Alomar shakes his head. “Good base stealer,” he said.

Vince Coleman? Another burner.

Whit Merrifield? “Whit’s a smart base runner,” Alomar said. “He sees things.”

Trea Turner? Now there’s one, finally! Turner is a burner.

Ji Hwan Bae could be one, says Pirates first base coach Tarrik Brock. But even he is hesitant to fully anoint Pittsburgh’s speedster, who he says approaches the basepaths “like Fast and the Furious” every single day.

Additional reading: What we’ve learned in first 30 games of MLB season, from pitch clock to Rays to A’s

Anyone else qualify?

“(Myles) Straw could be one if he’s fully healthy,” Alomar said. “Washington’s (CJ) Abrams could be one, too. And then there’s that kid who stole 70 in the minors last year. That’s what I’m talking about, guys who can steal when a pitcher is 1.3 (seconds to the plate), who can outrun the throw.”

That kid would be Boston prospect David Hamilton, who was 70-for-78 with Double-A Portland and finished tied in the minors for the most steals in a full-season league last year. (Mets prospect Omar De Los Santos also stole 70 but was caught 15 times, nearly double Hamilton’s total.) Hamilton, who was originally drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers before being part of the Hunter Renfroe trade, was moved up to Triple-A Worcester and added to Boston’s 40-man roster this winter. Last month, he went first to third on a ground ball to shortstop.

“Comparing anybody to Hamilton is probably unfair because it’s unbelievable,” Worcester manager Chad Tracy told Mass Live. “He’s got the innate ability to steal. He can just outrun the ball. There’s not many people like him out there.”

You get the point: Burners are rare. And unless the designated pinch runner rule — which is being tested out in the Atlantic League — becomes a reality in Major League Baseball, you probably aren’t going to see guys who have 80-grade (elite) speed and great instincts on the bases on every big-league roster.

Good base stealers though? That number is definitely going up. We’ll get to that later.

Shouldn’t the new rules create more burners?

If the new rules were enough on their own to create a slew of burners, we would have seen more than two players hit the 70-steal mark in the minors, where they have been enacted for various lengths of time. Just one other player, Royals Class-A shortstop Tyler Tolbert, hit the 60 mark last year. Tolbert, who was part of Royals big-league camp this spring, is currently at Double A and definitely could be a burner.

Tyler Tolbert has stolen his 21st and 22nd bases of the season today for Quad Cities. He’s still yet to be thrown out. He was 53/55 last year stealing bases.

For his career, Tolbert now has 105 stolen bases in 178 games. He’s been caught stealing just 3 times. pic.twitter.com/Tlrfigqa7d

— Royals Farm Report (@RoyalsFarm) May 29, 2022

Interestingly enough, limiting disengagements to two hasn’t created the havoc you would think when a pitcher runs out of them. There have only been an average of 0.1 stolen bases per game after a pitcher has thrown over twice, and the success rate is lower than in any other scenario.

Steals per game
• 0 pitcher disengagements: 1.2 steals, 78.3 percent success rate
• 1 disengagement: 0.5 steals, 82.1 percent success rate
• 2 disengagements: 0.1 steals, 77.4  percent success rate

You could make the case that pitchers aren’t often using both of their disengagements, but still more than half of the steals are taking place before even one disengagement.

And while the new rules are encouraging more steals, they could actually detract from encouraging burners. The pitch clock has shortened games by roughly a half-hour, which for players is less time on their feet. That should be good news. But with more action and less dead time, there’s little downtime in-game to recover. It’s nonstop action. That’s the main reason Turner — who stole 89 bases between 2017 and 2018 — has curbed his steals. Sure, the 29-year-old Turner could go more this year, but at what cost to his body?

“It’s more about being on the field,” he told The Athletic’s Jayson Stark this spring. “You know, asking people to steal 70 or 100 bases like guys used to do, I don’t know how they did it and stayed on the field.”

Vince Coleman with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1988, when he stole 81 bases. (Focus on Sport/Getty Images)

Taking nothing away from guys like Henderson and Coleman, but pitchers weren’t nearly as quick to the plate or as concerned with stopping the running game in the 1980s, which is widely considered the golden era of the stolen base. Teams like Cleveland, who have capitalized early on the bases, track each individual player and how they recover on a daily basis.

“That’s a big, big key,” said Alomar, who also spends a good chunk of time preparing players by studying pitchers’ tendencies and looking for ways to exploit them.

“Let’s say José Ramírez hits a double, then he tries to steal third base. And he’s making all the plays (in the field) and he’s doing it with maximum effort. I just don’t think the next day is gonna be as efficient as he was the day before. You have to pick and choose when the right time is to do that if you’re going to steal a bag.”

Brock, who even has 36-year-old Pirates star Andrew McCutchen stealing bases this season, says it may be the most important part of the job. Checking in on players daily. Earning their trust so on a day when a guy has tired legs, “You can say, ‘This is a huge part of the game, I need you to trust me on this’ and they go, ‘OK,’ and go in that situation.”

So what do we know?

The same couple of teams are accounting for the bulk of baseball’s steals. The Pirates lead baseball with 41, compiling the most stolen bases in the first month of the season by a team in 20 years. Pittsburgh last accumulated 41 steals in a month in 1985. Cleveland — tops in the American League and second only to the Pirates — is also back in the ’80s. The last time the Guardians stole 35 or more bases through the first 27 games was 1984, when they stole 41.

The Baltimore Orioles are third in baseball with 30 steals. The fact that three of the youngest teams in baseball are in front shouldn’t be a surprise. Those teams, and others with a lot of young players like Oakland, Miami and Arizona, have embraced the new rules and their ability to serve as basepath disruptors. It doesn’t hurt that many of the young players have already played under this set of rules in the minors.

“We don’t run because it’s in our skill set, we run because we think it helps us win,” said Cleveland manager Terry Francona. “There’s times when José (Ramírez) is hitting, we’ll have the guy at first not run even though we know he could steal it, but we like where we’re at with José hitting, leave the hole open and let him swing away.”

Francona said most of the Guardians have free rein on the basepaths though they work closely with Alomar to ensure it’s conducive to the game. Baserunning has been emphasized in Cleveland long before the new rules. Former player Rajai Davis, who is now MLB’s senior director of on-field operations, played with eight different organizations and said the then-Indians organization stood out as sticklers for baserunning and going first-to-third.

In spring training, Francona and staff routinely challenge players to test their limits on the bases, to see if they can stretch a single or go for the extra bag when the pressure of making an out that impacts the game’s outcome isn’t there. Seeing if they have the footspeed or need to play it safe. Under a game note titled, “Our Brand of Baseball,” Cleveland points out that five different players have five or more steals already this season: Straw, Ramírez, Andrés Giménez, Steven Kwan and Amed Rosario. No other team has more than three players.

Like Cleveland, Pittsburgh didn’t just wake up and decide to start running. Brock, who is in his fourth year in the organization, said the Pirates made a concerted effort in the second half of last season to steal more. It was something he and manager Derek Shelton talked about pushing further this winter. The Pirates employ a variety of methods — the straight steal, the vault, the hop and go. The key is to not get into a predictable rhythm. Last year they overused vaults and Brock said pitchers started to hold the ball more to slow them down or time a throw-over to first. He peppers his players with the acronym: SAT (smart, athletic, tough) and constantly asks them: What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? He wants them to believe in themselves, which is as important a facet of his job as poring over game film to document tendencies and frequencies.

“I try to stress we want to bring back the art of base stealing, not just running,” Brock said. “We want to bring back the art of setting guys up, going early, going a little bit later. And not being predictable, that’s the best thing we can do.”

The Orioles like their guys to be aggressive. Manager Brandon Hyde likes to point out that it’s not necessarily the new rules enabling his club to run wild. It’s the team’s personnel and approach, starting with Cedric Mullins and Jorge Mateo. No other team has two players in double-digits in stolen bases. Mateo and Mullins’ 21 combined steals are more than 20 MLB teams. The 28-year-old Mullins, who has 30 steals in back-to-back seasons, is the only current MLB player with double-digit steals who has yet to be caught.

“Speed has always been trendy. I honestly think that,” he said. “For a while there was this lack of what people would consider a leadoff hitter in the game and (overall speed suffered). For a guy like myself that fits that profile, speed being one of them, obviously being able to do damage on the bases, it’s always been part of my game and hopefully always will be.”

Cedric Mullins (Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports)

Mullins’ 11 successful stolen bases are the most to begin a season by an Oriole since Brian Roberts and Corey Patterson, who each swiped their first 13 attempts, an O’s record to start a campaign, in 2006.

While Hyde encourages all of the O’s to be aggressive, Mateo and Mullins have a longer leash because they’re fast and have earned that trust with consistently good instincts. Baltimore has only been caught stealing five times in 35 attempts, which is one of the top percentages in baseball. By contrast, the Angels have been caught six times and have just 14 steals on the season.

Where is this going?

So where do stolen bases go from here? Will we see a few teams up top continue to separate themselves? Will the rest of the league catch up, or try to? Through the season’s first month it’s clear the bigger bases, pitch clock and shift restrictions favor fast, athletic teams that make contact.

Baltimore and Cleveland entered May in second place in their respective divisions (though the Guardians were below .500) while Pittsburgh has been the surprise of baseball and entered Wednesday in first place in the NL Central.

“This shifts the ownership back to the teams, whether or not they will value that extra 90 feet,” Davis said of the new rules. “You probably aren’t going to be a good team if your base running is way down. You can only win so many games with home runs. At some point, you gotta play the game and part of the game is running the bases effectively and efficiently and aggressively.”

It would be foolish for teams not constructed like the Pirates, Guardians and Orioles to try to beat them at their own game to only run into outs. Even when a pitcher is out of disengagements, a swipe isn’t always there. There are pitchouts and quick pitches and the element of surprise is often compromised. As multiple people interviewed for this story pointed out again and again: Stealing bases involves smarts, not just speed.

Still, baseball is a copycat sport and if there is renewed emphasis on base running and defense, rosters will only get younger as those two aspects of the game tend to peak at earlier ages. Mullins thinks teams are already changing the way they view player skill sets.

“It’s a combination of everything,” Mullins said of the stolen-base craze around baseball. “They call up speed (more now) to be able to capitalize on the rule changes and there are just more toolsy guys all around.”

How does this affect future roster construction? Or what organizations value in drafts? While base stealing is generally viewed as a good thing, being caught on the bases can have a negative effect on a player’s WAR, which is an important statistic in negotiations during free agency and arbitration.

“It’s going to take buy-in from the manager and the organization. You got to have a manager that will let you take that risk,” Coleman said.

“That’s going to allow you to run freely. A base stealer mentality has to be that I’m going to take this base every time I get on base. You got to have a communication with the guy batting second, you got to have approval of the organization. In the 2000s they were holding (caught stealing) against guys and WAR is one of the big stats they can hold against you.”

Why, multiple people ask, has the game reached a dearth of true five-tool players? Perhaps the sport is overdue for a seismic shift in player development, for a return to the fundamentals of the game, where hard contact is rewarded and going first to third matters even when it doesn’t show up on a highlight reel. Perhaps mainly small-market teams will use it as their edge until the big-market clubs follow suit and squash any perceived advantage. This sport is, above anything else, about adjustments. Pitchers will adapt to more base stealers. Base stealers will adapt again. On and on it goes. As Brock points out, there are five guys working against a base stealer: the opposing pitcher, catcher, manager, bench coach and catching coach. It may be easier to steal bases, but it still isn’t easy.

Maybe we will see a few true burners return to the sport, guys who are drafted, developed and turned loose in the big leagues to try to chase 70, 80, even 100 steals. Or maybe we will have this: a rise of great base stealers developing from all sorts of players. Either way, it has added an exciting element back to the game, the rush of watching a guy break loose and dash behind the pitcher, sliding into the bag in hopes of helping his team.

“We aren’t trying to reinvent the game,” Alomar said, “we are just trying to make the rules work for us.”

(Top photo of Ji Hwan Bae: Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports)