When it comes to stolen bases, José Caballero ranks among the best in the business. In each of the past two seasons, the speedy shortstop/utilityman led the American League in steals, with 44 with Tampa Bay in 2024 and 49 between the Rays and Yankees last season. He accomplished this feat despite playing in only 265 games across the two seasons (roughly 80 percent of the available games).
To start this season, Caballero played the role of “elite basestealer” perfectly, successfully advancing on his first ten stolen base attempts to start the season. In the third inning on April 24th, however, Cabby was thrown out trying to steal third after successfully stealing second; since that play, he’s been downright bad, having been thrown out eight times in his last 15 attempts.
Now, the fact that Caballero is getting thrown out isn’t all that unusual. While he is fast, he lacks the overwhelming speed of players like Bobby Witt Jr. and Jorge Matteo, as his 28.3 ft/sec sprint speed ranks 105th in the league (the 76th percentile). Between that and his aggressiveness on the basepaths, he typically finds himself near the top of the caught stealing leaderboards. His 16 failed attempts in 2024 topped baseball (tied with Elly De La Cruz, who led baseball with 67 stolen bases), and his 11 failed attempts last year trailed only Tampa Bay’s Chandler Simpson.
What is strange this time around, though, is how streaky Cabby has been. After his first 10 successful attempts, he was nabbed in four of his next five attempts. Since then, he’s pretty much gone one-for-one, never going more than two successes or two failures in a row. For someone whose career stolen base percentage heading into the season was almost 80 percent, this seemed a little unusual, so I dove into the MLB Film Room to look at each of Caballero’s recent stolen base attempts. From this, I was able to categorize Caballero’s failed stolen base attempts.
Twice this season, Cabby successfully beat the throw, only to overslide the bag and get tagged out after he came off.
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Caballero tends to slide to the center field side of the second base bag, as it increases the distance the ball needs to travel by a foot or two, and thus makes it more difficult for him to be thrown out. The flip side of this, though, is that only friction from the ground is slowing him down; if he starts his slide too late, or the dirt is particularly slick, his momentum will carry him past the bag, because let’s be honest, one hand covered in an oven mitt will not be able to latch onto a flat slab all that easily.
Unfortunately, this is going to happen. Elite base stealers do this to varying degrees. See, for example, this stolen base by Jazz Chisholm Jr. from back in April:
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Even though Chisholm goes more directly at the bag than Caballero does – perhaps the result of his slightly faster sprint speed (28.5 ft/sec) – he still leans to the center field side of second base. Maybe Cabby could find a little bit more success if he does this more often, but at this point, if that extra few feet on the throw makes up for a handful of overslid bags during the season, you’ll take it.
Four attempts, meanwhile, required perfect throws from the catcher, and in three of them, for the play to be challenged by the defense. Two of them, furthermore, were in the same game, on April 25th against the Astros.
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About these four, there’s not much that I can say with the footage we have. Maybe he got a bad jump? At this point, I wouldn’t know. All I can say is, sometimes, the defense makes a great play, and you tip your cap to them.
There is, in truth, only one play here that I am overly concerned about, and it’s this one:
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The MLB Film Room labels it “Nick Martinez Pitchout to Ryan McMahon.” It’s not a traditional pitchout, which typically sees the ball thrown in the opposing batter’s box and the catcher jumping out to get clear of potential obstruction from the batter. But it is clear that the Rays knew Caballero was going to be running on the play. The catcher starts in a position to pop up and is moving well before the ball reaches home plate. Now the Yankees did acquire Caballero from the Rays, so they’re certainly familiar with his thinking, but honestly, I find Cabby predictable at times – and if I can find him predictable, I’m sure other teams can, too. This is, of course, anecdotal evidence, and I don’t like to make conclusions off anecdotal evidence, but in the absence of an easy way to reliably look at teams’ scouting reports, there’s not much else to do.
But is Caballero’s possible predictability a reason for concern? Honestly, not really. Of these seven times he was caught stealing, he was successful but fell off the bag twice, and was close enough three other times that, had the other team been out of challenges, he would have notched a stolen base. Based on what we can tell from our living rooms, it seems to me that Cabby is primarily a victim of sequencing: had all seven of his failed attempts been scattered among all 18 of his successful attempts, rather than bunched up within the last eight, then this wouldn’t be a story.
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