How base stealing made a (mini) comeback in 2020

Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports I did what I often do when looking for article ideas, which is digging through the leaderboards over at FanGraphs to see if anything catches my eye. I noticed that the number of steals (adjusted for season length) slightly increased in 2020.

It shouldn’t come as much surprise, then, to hear that stolen base attempts were also up last year.

Granted, teams were still considerably more hesitant to steal than they were at the start of the 2010s. To some extent, the home run surge in the back-half of the decade likely contributed to this trend. The higher the home run rate, the greater the relative cost of being thrown out stealing. That stolen bases waned during…