Josh Naylor, a first baseman listed at 5’10” and 235 lbs by MLB.com who had never previously recorded more than 10 stolen bases in a season, stole 30 in 2025. Eleven of them came with the Arizona Diamondbacks and the remaining 19 with the Seattle Mariners after he was traded at the deadline, as well as two more with Seattle in the postseason. I’m going to wager this will not be the first article you’ve read on this topic: Pitcher List’s very own Dave Brown gave Naylor’s baserunning the spotlight at the end of September, aided by first-hand accounts from Mariners teammates Julio Rodríguez, Logan Gilbert, and others. Chad Jennings of The Athletic did a similar feature a month earlier (subscription required). If you were, for some reason, unfamiliar with Naylor’s sudden talent for swiping bags, I recommend clicking on the links above!
Today, I’m going to put forth a concerted effort to quantify how someone as slow as Naylor managed to turn in a 20-30 season. Per Statcast, his sprint speed reached 24.4 feet per second this season. That’s in the third percentile. Thirty stolen bases is by far the highest total achieved by anyone with sprint speed below 25 ft/s since it was publicly tracked starting in 2015. The second-highest belongs to Yadier Molina, who stole nine bases in 2017. Naylor stole his 10th base of 2025 on June 19th. At 23.8 ft/s, Molina did not sprint as fast as Naylor does, but it’s important to note MLB has gotten faster since then – Molina finished in the seventh percentile of league-wide sprint speed that year.
Every major leaguer who spoke to Dave Brown when he was developing his story on Naylor shared the sentiment that he is very intelligent and observant on the basepaths, which he uses to overcome his lack of foot speed. This is certainly true—he picks his spots quite carefully, as he was only caught stealing twice all year (and one of those was an extra-innings attempt to steal home). Of the 17 qualified players who stole 30 bases in 2025, only Trevor Story (once) was caught at a less frequent rate. Naylor’s low sprint speed forces him to be selectively aggressive, to only go when he’s virtually certain he won’t be caught. When he does make a break for it, he gets an excellent secondary lead. The average difference in length between his secondary lead and primary lead on stolen base attempts placed above the 90th percentile this year.
*secondary lead distance minus primary lead distance on stolen base attempts only
The 2.7% frequency at which he attempted to steal when he had the chance is good for 86th percentile, but that’s in a sample full of slower players who simply choose not to steal. As far as actual would-be base-stealers go, he’s more cautious than that number suggests, yet despite that and everything else, he still got elite results. In the age of the pitch clock, where pitcher disengagements are limited and good defensive catchers are often better at framing than throwing, slow baserunners who can read the instincts of the pitcher and get out to huge leads such as Naylor and Juan Soto, are just as threatening to steal as the prototypical speed demons. Are there other slow guys near the top of the leadoff distance rankings whose stolen base totals might soon jump in a similar fashion?
Marlins catcher/DH Agustín Ramírez is coming off a rookie season with pedestrian results at the plate, but he flashed plus bat speed and top-end exit velocity. He stole 16 bases with 31st-percentile sprint speed thanks to one of the largest secondary leads in the sport. Cardinals catcher Iván Herrera has 23rd-percentile sprint speed and still managed eight steals with a .284 batting average. He wasn’t quite as aggressive, but like Ramírez and Naylor, the length of his secondary leads stood out on steal attempts. Both players’ underlying hit and swing metrics suggest a high offensive ceiling, but they also have the makings of a similar baserunning profile to Naylor: slow, but with big secondary leads. If they fine-tune their instincts, could they one day crush their career steal totals, too? If the state of Major League Baseball is such that 30 stolen bases are now possible with sub-25 ft/s sprint speed, more are sure to follow Naylor’s footsteps.
Amazingly, Naylor was more effective stealing against lefty pitchers than righties. Only Corbin Carroll, who could run circles around Naylor, produced a higher run value from stealing bases off lefties in 2025. Naylor was also top five in run value on steals of third base (A.K.A. the closer base for catchers to throw to) behind only Julio Rodríguez, José Ramírez, Trea Turner, and Carroll. He wasn’t just mooching off steals of second, he was looking for the extra 90 feet anywhere he could get it. His biggest steal of the season was of third base, and the Mariners arguably don’t reach the ALCS without it: with no one holding him on second, and Tarik Skubal unable to hear his infielders telling him to step off through the loud crowd, Naylor dashed to third and came around to score the first run of Game 5 of the ALDS on a sacrifice fly. Seattle would go on to win, 3-2, in 15 innings.
Baseball Savant’s baserunning data splits lead distance by stolen base attempts and total opportunities. The difference between Naylor’s secondary and primary leads when trying to steal versus not is nearly 14 feet (95th percentile). In other words, you’ll know if he’s going well before the pitch reaches the plate, judging by how big of a jump he gets. Still, the burning question pertaining to his observational skills on the bases has not yet been answered: how does he know when to go for it? What’s on his mental checklist that tells him whether or not to steal?
Breaking down his steal attempts by the opposing catcher reveals some interesting info. For one, he liked to challenge rookie backstops, as well as those who were out of practice, even if their throwing metrics were good enough that they should be able to throw out someone with his speed. One of his first steals of the season was against J.C. Escarra, who, despite a strong pop time, had no experience throwing out big-league runners before this year. He successfully got rookies Jimmy Crooks and Sebastián Rivero, too. In one of his first series with the Mariners in early August, he stole four times off poor White Sox rookie Kyle Teel. Challenging inexperienced catchers regardless of their arm strength can be a wise, spur-of-the-moment maneuver—in Teel’s case, his pop time to thirrd base was one of the worst in the league, and two of those four steals that week were of third base. Looking at the catchers Naylor stole against as a group, though, doesn’t tell us much we didn’t know before.
If we aggregate all the catchers that Naylor tried to commit thievery on in 2025, we basically get a league-average catcher. Sure, most of them weren’t great at stopping the running game, but the big-picture equation here still doesn’t make sense. A matchup between a league-average catcher against a runner with third-percentile sprint speed should tilt in the defense’s favor more than twice out of 32 attempts. We know Naylor isn’t fast, and we know most of the catchers tasked with throwing him out this year weren’t special defensively either way. That leaves just one more possible explanation:
SBO = all stolen base opportunities / SBA = stolen base attempts
The pitchers. Now we’re getting somewhere. Naylor made his steal attempts against pitchers he knew were less of a threat to somehow limit his ability to steal, whether it be through a slow delivery, infrequent pickoff moves, or something else he’s reading on the fly or seeing in the advance scouting report. The average gap between secondary and primary leads when runners attempt to steal is 11.25 feet, but the season average of the pitchers Naylor stole against was an extra two feet and change—and Naylor’s own lead distance gained on steal attempts was another three and a half feet more than that. This is one of the greatest economic usages of foot speed in the history of baseball: it doesn’t quite matter if you have third-percentile sprint speed when, between your knack for secondary leads and the pitchers’ carelessness, you have about one fewer body length to travel when attempting to steal. That distance makes more than a world of difference when it comes to stealing bases.
On a case-by-case basis, it’s now very apparent why his quest to steal was so unbothered by lefties. If we sort all the pitchers he stole against by base-stealing run value allowed, six of the seven laggards are left-handed: Framber Valdez (1.97, most among all MLB LHP), Joey Wentz (1.75), Robbie Ray (1.71), Tyler Anderson (0.90), Carson Palmquist (0.81), and Mason Montgomery (0.70). The one righty in that list is the now-retired Kyle Hendricks, sandwiched between Ray and Anderson. Naylor stole twice off him. Only four pitchers of the total group kept opponents on the basepaths to a negative run value on the season. Brandon Eisert of the White Sox is the only lefty he stole twice against, and despite being one of the four who had a positive effect on the running game overall, runners against him extended their lead by more than 13.2 feet on stolen base attempts, nearly right in line with the average of this group shown above. To refresh your memory, he was pitching during the steals that Kyle Teel was catching. Teel is a quality young ballplayer with a bright future ahead of him, so I feel bad for harping on him in this one, but you can imagine Naylor was probably champing at the bit in those particular situations.
This conclusion reminds me of an outstanding point made by Foolish Baseball on YouTube (who has been one of the best in the business for years) in a video he made about Rod Barajas back in 2020: In most cases, bases are stolen off the pitcher, not the catcher. Barajas has the worst single-season caught-stealing rate on record, but a quick video study would show he was often victimized by his pitchers’ slow deliveries to the plate. The running game pales in comparison to the impact the pitcher can have when just focusing on the hitter, but if he doesn’t help the catcher out when a runner is trying to steal, what can be done anyhow?
A final thing worth touching on in this unlikeliest-of-all-30-stolen-base seasons: Josh Naylor’s total value on the basepaths was merely average in 2025. For all his calculated aggression when stealing, he was overly conservative when giving himself the chance to take the extra base on hits to the outfield. Together, base stealing and taking the extra base are the two components that make up Statcast’s baserunning run value. When combining the two, his total impact on the bases comes out to even according to this measure.
His stealing prowess is offset by the lack of opportunities he took to stretch a single into a double, and vice versa. In fairness to him, not many players with third-percentile sprint speed are going to be reckless out there, but either way, it goes to show the brilliant and ingenious methods he uses to break even on the bases. This was the first season since 2021, when he was decently faster than he is now, that his baserunning run value wasn’t negative. It’s a part of the game that has always mattered—the entire AL playoff picture could have ended up differently if not for his steal of third in Game 5 of the division series—and even if he’ll always be detrimentally conservative when he has the chance to leg out an extra base hit by virtue of his lack of speed, he’ll make up for it with unmatched situational awareness when he gets on. Josh Naylor’s 30 stolen bases in 2025 could prove to be a benchmark for slow runners becoming threats to steal in the pitch clock era, and we should all be excited to see which current unknowns join him in the near future.
