Stealing Bases Is A Confidence Game
Notes on Trout and Trout-adjacent things from two weeks down.
Here’s something funny about Mike Trout you wouldn’t notice unless you’re at the park, watching him pre-game or between innings or in center field during non-action moments: He often moves in slow motion. In situations when other people might simply walk, Trout jogs, but at quarter-speed, as though he’s got a piano on his back and a bear-trap on his foot. There’s no reason for this, as far as I can tell. It’s just a physical affect I’ve noticed for several years. It’s like he’s play-acting the one thing that he never experiences: a body that doesn’t move perfectly.
Whenever I see him pretend that jogging is a labor for him, I remember one time when Trout was young and at his peak and I gloomily imagined a time he wouldn’t be:
If you only ever saw Trout’s statistics, you might think this day arrived ahead of schedule. On August 31, 2019, he stole his 200th career base, becoming the youngest player ever to reach 200 steals and 200 homers in his career. He didn’t attempt another steal that season, and in the past three years he has attempted a total of only five, after averaging 40 attempts per year up to that point in his career.
Reader Nate points out that Trout’s stolen base drop-off could be historic, or at least fun factish:
Could Trout become the first 30HR/30SB player not named Sammy Sosa to also turn in a subsequent 30/0 season? He's already come as close as humanly possible, posting a 40/1 season last year.
As best I can tell, the other 30/30 guys to come closest were Henry Aaron (47/1 & 40/1) in 1971/1973, Jose Canseco (34/3) in 1999, Ellis Burks (32/3) in 2002, and Matt Kemp (35/1) and Carlos Beltran (29/1) in 2016, all doing so at the tail end of their respective careers. Sosa somehow did it three times. However, in only one of those, his age-35 season, did he not at least make one steal attempt.
I know speed is not a tool that ages well and that injuries play a part for Trout, but even Bonds stole five bases at age 42. Trout's about-face on the bases starting in his age-28 season still seems rather abrupt. Is this something to actually be rooting for? Cause for concern? Something in between?
Beltran was 39. Burks was 37. Canseco was 34. Aaron was 37. Sosa was in his early 30s when he quit running, but he only tapered down gradually. Trout was 28 when stopped all at once and, crucially, unlike those other guys, he is still (at age 31) very fast. His sprint speed hasn’t changed in the eight years Statcast has been tracking it, defying the typical running speed aging curve. If Trout ran as often as his most comparable sprint-speeders do, he’d attempt about 20 stolen bases per year. There’s a decent chance this year he’ll actually attempt zero.
Trout’s basestealing has ebbed several times in his career, with four or five official explanations offered along the way. In 2015, he said he was running less because the batter behind him was so good: “When I get chances to run, I’ll run. It just so happens that everything Albert is hitting, he’s squaring up, so you don’t want to take the bat out of his hands. I want to let him swing.” After 2017, when Trout missed a month because of a thumb injury suffered while stealing second base, it was suggested he’d run less to protect his health; he has since had calf and back injuries unrelated to basestealing. This month, the Athletic’s Sam Blum noted that the Angels as an organization really don’t like to give away outs, especially in the middle of the order, and that manager Phil Nevin makes all the running decisions. (Blum points out that Shohei Ohtani, a similarly fast runner, abruptly quit stealing bases mid-season last year, and doesn’t have a stolen base since July.)
Those are all probably partial explanations. But Trout has also gone through periods of his career where he just didn’t feel like he was good at reading pitchers. In 2014, when he first partially throttled his running game, it was said to be “a timing issue.” The next year he was working closely with bench coach Dino Ebel to watch film and pick up on pitchers’ tendencies, and seemed to be past the timing issue: “He wants to be more aggressive,” Ebel said. “He wants to steal bases. Mentally this year… he’s feeling comfortable doing it.” In 2016, lack of confidence popped up again. Trout: “It's definitely one of the personal goals I want to get back to. The last couple years my confidence has been down, not getting good jumps, not getting good reads, just getting back to the way I used to be.” His manager at the time, Mike Scioscia: “A lot of it comes down really on Mike's evolution and getting that confidence back.”
Stealing bases is all based on confidence. Taking a big lead is an act of confidence. Leaving on a pitcher’s first move is an act of confidence. Unlike throwing a pitch, reacting to a pitch, or fielding a ball hit to you, stealing a base is completely optional. You only do it because you’re very confident you’ll make it.
So a recurring story at times in his career was that Trout wanted to steal bases but he went through confidence slumps. Even when he was stealing bases, he wasn’t always stealing them confidently.
The five stolen base attempts he has made since he joined the 200/200 club are, perhaps, telling:
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