How base stealing made a (mini) comeback in 2020

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.