Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images

As an inveterately unhappy middle-aged man, I don’t like pointing out when things get better. So when I say that the 2023 MLB rule changes massively improved baseball as a spectator experience, you can rest assured that I’m not making that assertion lightly.

You know what I’m talking about: The shift ban, the pitch clock, and the pizza box bases. Back in the olden days, a sufficiently daring and athletic ballplayer could rack up 50, 60, or even 100 steals in a season. But the response to that era has been a gradual tightening up of baserunning tactics.

First, the roided-up giants of the 1990s got too stiff and meaty to run and slide. Even those athletes who maintained their springiness didn’t want to run into an out when the guy at the plate could use his 25-inch forearms to drive them in from anywhere. In the 2000s, an army of Theo Epstein wannabes took over baseball operations en masse. These men, with their locust-like commitment to efficiency, discouraged risky baserunning behavior even further. While their Harvard MBA classmates were killing the American housing market, they killed the stolen base.

That was supposed to change with the 2023 rules. Pitchers could no longer throw to the bases with impunity. That, and the six-inch reduction in distance between the bags, was supposed to tip the scales ever so slightly in the baserunners’ favor. The change was meant to be subtle, even imperceptible to anyone who wasn’t actively looking at it, but just powerful enough to encourage more proactive baserunning:

It worked. Ronald Acuña Jr. is precisely the kind of player constrained by the conservative baserunning norms of the modern game. A great athlete and a plus runner, Acuña led the National League with 37 steals — a pitiful total — in his second season in the majors. But every time Acuña got caught, he took away a potential RBI from Freddie Freeman or Austin Riley or (later on) Matt Olson. And with every hard slide, he stressed his precious joints and muscles, risking an injury that’d keep his 40-homer bat out of the lineup.

In 2023, Acuña stole 73 bases on 87 attempts. It was the first 70-steal season in the big leagues since 2009, and the second-highest total of stolen base attempts in the 21st Century. Acuña was named NL MVP in a unanimous vote.

The next year, Shohei Ohtani, in what looked like a similar just-for-S’s-and-G’s experiment, swiped 59 bags. Guess how many MVP votes he got? Elly De La Cruz led the majors with 67 steals that year. In 2025, José Ramírez — he of one 30-steal campaign in 10 big league seasons before the new rules — logged his second straight 40-steal season. Bobby Witt Jr., who stole 49 bases in 2023, purloined another 38 in 2025.

The greatest stars in baseball are often great athletes as well, and for the first time in a generation, they weren’t afraid to put their legs to work. I was thrilled. Having 30-homer power didn’t stop Willie Mays, or Eric Davis, or even the young Barry Bonds from racking up dozens of steals per year. Why should Acuña or Ohtani or Witt be so constrained?

And it wasn’t just great athletes who ran a lot. Juan Soto and Josh Naylor both stole 30-plus bags in 2025, even though neither of them is fast enough to outrun a sea cucumber. A new day is dawning, comrades.

Or so I thought.

This is a top nine instead of a top 10 because there’s a five-way tie for 10th place and I didn’t want to overextend the table. It bears mentioning that Naylor, Jackson Merrill, and CJ Abrams are three of the five players involved in that tie. Witt and Ramírez are both still running a lot. So are the intractably pedal-to-the-metal Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Pete Crow-Armstrong.

But this leaderboard is mostly populated by specialists. Players who hang around the majors in the vain hope that someday they’ll be allowed to steal first base. Even Tatis isn’t really a power hitter anymore.

Maybe the superstar stolen base holiday was too wonderful to live long. After all, Acuña has been hurt basically since the moment he wrapped up that 73-steal campaign. Perhaps the time has come to return high-volume basestealing to the specialists, while the stars settle for 20 bags a year.

If you look at this season’s leaderboard, you’ll see that Nasim Nuñez is the only player with more than 35 stolen bases. Not to worry, I can hear you thinking. There’s plenty of season left.

Except… there isn’t actually that much season remaining anymore. Only five of these players are on pace to steal 40 or more bags. Nuñez is on pace for 51. If he goes a week or two without getting on base enough to make an attempt — which is not, like, inconceivable for a hitter like Nuñez — we could end up going without a 50-steal campaign for the first time since the rule change.

A season without a 50-steal player is an aberration in recent history. In the five seasons leading up to the rule change (four, really, if you account for 2020), nobody stole 50 bases in a season. For comparison, there were only four seasons without a 50-steal player between 1958 and 2017. In 2022, Jon Berti led the majors with 41 steals, which was the lowest league-leading total in a full season since 1963.

A thinning out at the top of the leaderboard doesn’t necessarily augur a return to station-to-station running, but let’s go back to that graph from earlier. Computer, enhance:

Look at that. The overall stolen base attempt rate is dropping. Perceptibly. So is the success rate, but basestealers are still converting at a much higher rate than at any point in pre-2023 baseball history. Apparently that’s not enough for the greedy lead-footed bastards who call the shots. The league-wide attempt rate has already fallen below where it was as recently as 2012.

It’s a disgrace. Everyone in MLB should be relieved that Rickey Henderson isn’t around to be disappointed by the state of his once-beautiful game. (What the heck, I’ll go watch Harold Reynolds tell his story about Rickey and the 1987 stolen base title again.)

I’m sure that sounds like an overreaction, but it’s easiest to treat a disease — physical or social — in its early stages. If we wait another decade to confront this problem, it might be too late.

I don’t want to enlarge the bases again, or further restrict pickoff moves. The 1980s were the golden age of basestealing, but the uppers and Astroturf that defined that era of baseball had, um, significant negative side effects. Bringing back greenies will probably cause more problems than it solves. Maybe we should hide a taser underneath first base. There is no greater motivation to action than the threat of random electrocution. I’m just thinking out loud here.

The stolen base is one of the most exciting plays in baseball; even the threat of it allows viewers to dream of (or fear, depending on one’s rooting interest) a big inning after just a single or a walk. We waited too long and sacrificed too much to get it back. I will not stand by and do nothing while it fades into disuse once more.