Fantasy Baseball Steals Report: Marlins defensive woes on display, Bobby Witt Jr. finds his speed

Welcome to the second season of the steals report! I will be here every Wednesday to go over important stolen base trends so you can find more speed for your fantasy teams.

Stealing a base is as much about the opposing pitcher and catcher as it is the actual base runner themself. So, being able to spot which teams and pitchers specifically are being run on most frequently will help you to figure out who can swipe some bags over the next week.

Before we get to this week’s important trends, here is the stolen base leaderboard over the past seven days.

Bobby Witt Jr. turned on the jets last week with six stolen bases coming across five separate games. Just wait until he gets hot.

It’s been a slow start to the season for Jakob Marsee across the board, but he stole four bags on Tuesday alone to help ease the early panic.

Miguel Vargas and Sal Stewart chipping in a couple of steals is nice.

Now, here is the overall stolen base leaderboard on the season.

It’s nice to see a handful of the usual suspects like Witt, Nico Hoerner, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Brice Turang, José Caballero and more on this list.

Nasim Nuñez is making good on the hope that near-guaranteed playing time would lead to enough stolen bases to make him a viable late-round target. Luisangel Acuña has proven the same.

Chandler Simpson somewhat shockingly has a .444 on-base percentage through 11 games. With that, he’s had plenty of chances to use his speed.

Carson Benge’s stolen bases are nice. His .393 OPS is not.

Next, here are some players that we’d hoped would be more aggressive or efficient on the base paths so far

Honestly, seeing Ronald Acuña Jr. just being aggressive is encouraging despite the lack of success.

Juan Soto had not attempted a stolen base and will now be out two to three weeks with a calf strain. Will he even get to 10 steals this season?

Stolen bases seem like they couldn’t be further from Shohei Ohtani’s mind at the moment.

Now, let’s go over the most important stolen base trends over the past week.

Fantasy Baseball Stolen Base Targets

We’re just 11 games into the season and the Marlins have allowed four more stolen bases than any other club. Worse, these woes are beginning to cost them games.

In their past two contests, the Reds have been successful on five of six tries. Agustín Ramírez did catch his second runner of the year – which is 25% of his total runners caught from last season in nearly 9% of the innings behind the plate – despite this still being a huge problem both for him and the team.

Case and point, it sunk them on Tuesday night.

Sandy Alcantara seemed like he was working on consecutive complete game shutouts before everything fell apart in the ninth inning. With one out, he allowed a double to Matt McLain and walked Elly De La Cruz before being pulled for reliever Anthony Bender.

Just after, McLain and De La Cruz executed a double-steal. They came home to score first on a sacrifice fly and then a two-out wild pitch that Ramírez tried to back-hand, but bounced a bit too far from him.

The Reds wound up winning in extras and Ramírez’s defensive issues continue to be a huge problem. Not to mention he had a throwing error earlier in the game that put Noelvi Marte on third base before Alcantara pitched out of the jam.

Before this series, they let the notoriously slow Yankees run wild on them as well. They had five in one game with hot-hitter Liam Hicks behind the plate. Three of those came with Eury Pérez on the mound.

Worse than that, Giancarlo Stanton stole one in a different game. And this wasn’t a classic walking lead with no one looking, he straight up stole his first base since 2020 despite running like the tin man.

That one was at the expense of Ramírez and Calvin Faucher. The Marlins have two more games against the Reds this week and then head to Detroit and Atlanta on a road trip. Every player on those teams is in play to contribute some stolen bases.