Josh Naylor weighs 235 pounds and runs with a sprint speed of 24.5 feet per second, ranking 532nd out of 546 measured MLB players. He’s built like a beer-league softball cleanup hitter, the kind of stocky first baseman who looks like he should be managing a car dealership, not stealing bases. And yet, in his first month after being acquired by the Seattle Mariners at the trade deadline, this absolute unit swiped 11 bases, putting him on par with speedsters such as Elly De La Cruz and Jarren Duran. In his first 14 games with Seattle, Naylor stole more bases than he had in any full season of his career. He hasn’t been caught stealing since April.

This is what baseball looks like after you fix what was ailing it.

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The sport implemented new base-stealing rules in 2023 that were at once simple and radical: bases grew from 15 to 18 inches square, cutting 4.5 inches off the distance between bags; pitchers got limited to two pickoff attempts before risking a balk; and the pitch clock forced everyone to actually play ball instead of engaging in endless staring contests. The immediate result? Stolen bases jumped from 2,487 in 2022 to 3,617 in 2024, the league’s highest total since 1915, while the success rate hit an all-time high of 80.2% in 2023 before dipping to 78.2% last year. More importantly, people started showing up again. Attendance rose by 9.6% in 2023, the biggest jump in 30 years.

For a sport drowning in its own analytics, watching Naylor lumber his way to 22 steals this season feels like divine intervention. Baseball spent the last decade optimizing itself into a coma. The stolen base attempt rate had crashed to 0.51 per team per game by 2022, way down from 0.75 in the steal-happy 1980s. Teams collectively decided, via spreadsheet, that trying to steal second base wasn’t worth the risk when you could just wait for someone to hit a three-run homer, walk, or, most commonly, strike out. Those were basically your only options in modern baseball: the “three true outcomes” that turned America’s pastime into a glorified home run derby interrupted by ceaseless, time-wasting pitching changes.

While MLB’s long-overdue changes made baseball unpredictable again in ways that helped Naylor, the sport’s best players have exploited them like a cheat code. In 2024, Shohei Ohtani became the first player in history to hit 50 homers and steal 50 bases in a season, finishing with 54 bombs and 59 steals. Then there’s Ronald Acuña Jr., the Atlanta Braves outfielder who went absolutely nuclear in 2023 with 73 stolen bases to go with 41 homers, becoming the first player ever to join the 40-70 club. Pete Crow-Armstrong, the Chicago Cubs’ toolsy center fielder who is chasing National League MVP honors while refusing to take a walk, has nabbed 31 bags to go with 28 homers. And while second-generation Kansas City Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. might only be arguably the best player in either league right now, he’s inarguably the fastest — the stopwatch doesn’t lie.

Even the genuinely weird cases get to show what they’re capable of. Oneil Cruz, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 6-foot-7-inch, 240-pound shortstop who somehow combines elite speed and power with a complete inability to make consistent contact or field his position, stole 22 bases in 2024 and already has 36 this year. Living a mile from nearly deserted PNC Park and watching Cruz play is like watching a create-a-player in MLB The Show 25 with all the physical attributes maxed out, but with the controller unplugged half the time. Under the old rules, his speed would’ve been irrelevant because even when he got on base, he’d be kept so close to the bag that he’d struggle to use it. Now he’s a legitimate threat every time he reaches first, which still doesn’t happen often enough to matter.

This statistical transformation certainly matters. Success rates for stealing third base jumped from 76% to 96%. Relief pitchers now give up steals at an 88% clip compared to 79% for starters. Nine teams in 2023 stole more bases than the 2022 league leader. Game times have dropped by 30 minutes over the past three years while actual action has increased. Overall television ratings for the playoffs remain flat, but viewership in that key male 18-to-49 demographic rose 10% since the change.

Resistance to fixing this was predictable. Baseball treats tradition like scripture — as Moneyball readers know, the power of advanced statistics also had to be imposed from above on this hidebound sport — and any rule change gets met with prophecies of doom. Old-timers complained about the pitch clock and possible injuries to pitchers. Purists worried about the integrity of the game’s statistical milestones. Analytics departments probably panicked about their carefully calibrated models becoming obsolete overnight. But here’s the thing: baseball is more fun now.

THE WNBA SHOULD PROTECT CAITLIN CLARK LIKE GOLD

The contrast with other sports is instructive. The NBA eliminated hand-checking and turned defense into a suggestion, creating a no-pressure league where everyone jacks up 3-pointers and plays matador defense. The NFL protects quarterbacks like endangered species while turning games into four-hour commercial marathons. Meanwhile, baseball made changes that actually restored, and perhaps even improved, what makes baseball baseball. Imagine if the NBA again started letting big guys lay hands on the men they’re guarding, or if the NFL adopted Canadian Football League rules with longer and wider fields, 12 players to a side, presnap motion, and that chaos-inducing single-point rouge. I’m talking about smart moves that could make these games fun to watch again instead of the predictable, advertiser-friendly slogs they’ve become.

If a meaty man such as Naylor can swipe bags at a 92% clip, through what his coaches call good baserunning IQ and an eye for tendencies rather than raw speed, then baseball has successfully restored something essential: uncertainty. The stolen base is back, and with it comes proof that sports can still surprise us, that athletes can still transcend their limitations, and that, sometimes, the best way to save a tradition is to change the rules in ways that let the players play.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. His Substack is Oliver Bateman Does the Work.