The 2024 Washington Nationals led both leagues in stolen bases (barely) and the number of times caught stealing (by a large margin). That resulted in a relatively low success rate of 75.3 percent, a full 10 percentage points worse than the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 85.5 percent, which led the majors.
Yet unlike the Dodgers, the Nats didn’t hit many home runs, so manager Dave Martinez felt his team had to run aggressively to increase its chances of scoring. The 2024 Nationals finished 29th out of the 30 MLB teams with just 135 home runs.
“We’ve got to create different things,” Martinez told the media in September. “This year, stealing bases was very, very important for us…. We’ve had our flaws, but I think overall we’ve done a better job with that.”
It wasn’t just one or two players who helped Washington’s base stealing. The 2024 Nationals became the first team since the 1917 Pirates with 23 players who had at least one stolen base in a single season, Jessica Camerato of MLB.com reported.
The aggressiveness came with a downside. The MLB average on successful steals this past season was 79 percent. The Nationals rate was 75 percent (75.3 to be precise.) The average number of runners picked off per team was 12. The Nationals had 29 runners picked off.
Team leader Jacob Young was picked off six times, two of them counted among his 10 times caught stealing. He stole 33 bases. His success rate stealing was 76.7 percent, but after 12 straight steals to begin the season, his success percentage fell to 67.7. That mirrored the team’s decline from better than 85 percent through April.
Nationals’ runners were out in various ways on the bases (trying to stretch a hit, take an extra base or advance on a pitch in the dirt, for example) 54 times, other than being caught stealing. The league average for a team was 43.
The Nationals’ 223-stolen base total was up from 127 stolen bases from 2023 and just 75 in 2022. The league-leading total also was a team record.
Overall, MLB teams stole stole 3,617 bases this past season, the third most in a season since the A.L. joined the N.L. as a major league, trailing only the deadball-era years of 1914 (4,574) and 1915 (4,108).
Clearly, the increase this season and in 2023 has been due in large part to the increase in the size of the bases and the limit on pick-off attempts and pitcher step-offs. Most steal attempts are bang-bang plays that often result in challenges, so shortening the distance by 4.5 inches makes a difference. But it still requires manager, coaches and runners to choose carefully the best time to try to steal. Some teams do it better than others.
Aside from the Dodgers, who ranked in the top 10 with 136 steals, nine other teams were successful in more than 80 percent of their stolen-base attempts (three others were rounded up by MLB to an even 80 percent.
The Pirates were close behind the Dodgers (84.8 to L.A.’s 85.5 percent). The Brewers were third at 83.8 percent. Even the Nationals had a better success rate than five other teams.
None of the teams with the lowest success rates made the playoffs. The Angels actually kept the woeful White Sox from finishing with the worst stolen-base success rate (73.2 percent for Chicago but just 72.7 percent for Los Angeles.
An anomaly: Ronald Acuna Jr.’s season-ending injury decimated the Braves’ stolen-base total. Atlanta as a team in 2024 stole fewer bases (62) than Acuna alone in 2023 (73).
The change toward more base-stealing is a dramatic reversal from the Moneyball and sabermetric-inspired fear of losing an out. In 2002, the Athletics’ Billy Beane told ESPN that if a team doesn’t attempt to steal, “you’re saving yourself a lot of outs….Which is more valuable: a potential out or one more base?” With batting averages down and hits becoming harder to come by, many managers are answering that question differently now than they did back then
This also appeared in the Nov. 22, 2024, edition of Here’s The Pitch, the daily online newsletter of the Internet Baseball Writers Association, and in Here’s The Pitch 2025, a collection of 35 of the best articles from 2024, published by Acta Sports.
Washington baseball history 