One of the most confusing parts of the Orioles season was that Jackson Holliday was so bad on the bases. Through spring training we heard a lot of stories about Holliday’s offseason. He ate nothing but ground beef, he put on a ton of muscle, he slept in his batting cage and yada yada.
One of the stories about Holliday’s offseason was that he wanted to use his speed on the bases and that he had worked all offseason on getting better at stealing bases and that he even re-taught himself how to run.
The result of all that hard work? He was the worst base stealer in baseball by success rate out of anyone who attempted at least 28 stolen bases. In his 28 stolen base attempts he was caught stealing 11 times. The only person in the league who was caught more times than him was Chandler Simpson who attempted 66 stolen bases and was caught 12 times.
According to Statcast Holliday was the single worst base stealer in the league according to their stat “Runs via Stolen Base”.
This guy ate so much beef and relearned how to run and the result was the worst high volume base stealer in the league? What happened?
With most baseball stats the season long sample size is too massive to say we’re going to look at every single instance. If you’re disappointed in a guy’s batting average it would take a lot of work to look at every single at bat and try to determine what went wrong.
BUT Holliday’s 11 caught stealings are not so many that we can’t look at all of them and try to diagnose what went wrong.
Here is a quick log of Jackson Holliday’s stolen base attempts. Besides just safe or out I also looked at home vs away, speed and type of pitch and whether or not the catcher he was running on had a good arm (To measure this I used the arbitrary cutoff of top 20 in average pop time, apologies if that’s not the best way to do it) and where the pitcher ranked in controlling the run game.
All in all I didn’t see a lot of trends here. Holliday was thrown out 3 times on four seam fastballs in the mid 90s, 3 times on sinkers in the low nineties and 3 times on sliders in the high 80s. In fact he successfully stole on the three hardest pitches he ran on.
The quality of the catcher also had no real correlation. Over the course of the season Holliday ran on 8 of the top 20 catchers by average pop time and was safe 5 out of 8 times (63%) compared to running on non top 20 arms where he was 11 for 18 (61%).
It also didn’t seem to matter how good the pitcher was at holding runners. Using the stat cast stat Net Bases Prevented (which as far as I can tell is their best catch all running game stat for pitchers) I tracked if the pitchers Holliday was stealing off of were in the top 100 (good) middle 200 (average) or bottom 100 (bad) in that stat.
According to Net Bases Prevented Holliday ran on 6 “good” pitchers and went 4/6, he ran on 6 “average” pitchers and went 3/6 and he ran on 13 “bad” pitchers and went 8/13. As well as 2 pitchers who didn’t qualify.
You’ll notice there’s a couple missing rows of data. Those are special instances. One where Holliday was caught stealing by the pitcher stepping off, one where statcast was down so there was no pitch data and one where it was pretty much a wild pitch but the scorekeeper was generous and gave Holliday a stolen base. (Not to shade Holliday at all, he actually scored from second on the wild pitch. It was one of his best plays of the season)
My real takeaway from this little chart was the distribution of caught stealings. Holliday started the season 2 for 7. If your goal at the end of the season is to have a good stolen base percentage then starting 2 for 7 is going to make that very difficult.
For the record I don’t think it was a terrible thing that Holliday had such a bad base running season. He’s a very young player and in a lost season you want your young players to work on things that will make them better players in future seasons. That’s what Holliday did, he pushed through some base running struggles and as a result by the end of the year he was a better base stealer than when the season began.
It was an interesting journey though. You might be asking yourself; if what the pitcher was throwing and who was behind the plate don’t seem to matter what went wrong?
I watched every single Holliday caught stealing and I noticed 2 real issues, bad jumps and bad slides. Even the best base stealers get caught sometimes so not every caught stealing is an indictment on Holliday’s ability but when you look at all his caught stealings it tells a story.
CS #1 – Guilty – Bad Slide
The first caught stealing came in the O’s second series of the season. This is one I would put in the bucket of a bad slide.
3-31 – @ home – Newcomb/Wong – 93 mph sinker – challenged
Here you see him starting the steal. He’s got a decent lead especially considering that he’s trying to steal off a lefty.
Here he is as the ball leaves the hand. This isn’t a great jump but considering that he’s running on a lefty, Newcomb tops out at 94 mph and Wong is below average when it comes to throwing runners out, I’d call this a competitive jump.
You see here he’s into his slide well ahead of the ball. You can see the little dirt tail showing where his back foot started dragging. It’s a close play and Hyde even challenges the call but it stands and Holliday is out. As I watch it in slow mo I can’t help but feel that if he goes head first here he’s safe.
To this point Holliday had been a firm feet first slider in his career and Ben McDonald even makes mention of it on the broadcast that he always slides feet first. Not long after this we see Holliday start to slide head first into second on his steal attempts. I would imagine the coaching staff watched the same video I did and told him you’re probably safe on a few of these caught stealings if you go head first.
That’s tricky. So much was made of Holliday’s offseason work on speed and base running and just a few weeks into the season he ends up changing the way he slides. He was most likely sliding feet first all offseason so what we see of him sliding head first the rest of 2025 is him learning how to do that on the fly.
CS #2 – Guilty – Bad Jump
This caught stealing I would bucket as a bad jump. He’s facing a righty and you can see in the first image here that the pitcher is pretty well into his motion and Holliday is just barely shifting his weight towards second base.
He’s running on a righty and gets a good pitch to run on, in fact it’s the second slowest pitch he runs on all year and he’s out pretty convincingly. To Hedges’ credit it’s a really good throw.
4-17 – @ CLE, Junis/Hedges, 82 mph slider
CS #3 – Guilty – Bad Slide
This is Holliday’s first head first slide on a stolen base attempt. He was originally called safe and I am pretty surprised they were able to overturn this one, it’s super close.
Holliday is brand new at sliding head first so I’ll give him grace on this but if he reaches for the back corner of the bag instead of the middle they don’t get him here. We’ll see him improve on this part of his head first sliding over the course of the season so I’m not worried about it.
It was also an unfortunate pitch to run on and a great throw by Jeffers. One thing I noticed from watching all of Holliday’s caught stealings was that he was the victim of a lot of absolute lasers from opposing catchers. Maybe this is more of an Adley criticism but there were a lot of throws on Holliday where I felt like that would be the best throw from an Orioles catcher in half a decade.
5/7 – @ MIN – Woods Richardson/Jeffers, head first 94 mph 4S fastball – challenged (MIN)
CS #4 – Guilty – Bad Jump
This is another bad jump. It’s somewhat understandable because it’s a full count send in the top of the ninth. So the pitcher knows you’re going and it’s important to make sure you don’t get picked off and you know that the only way there’s going to even be a throw on you is if the batter strikes out.
As Holliday is taking off here he’s really playing the numbers game that if the pitch is a ball that there won’t be a throw and if the ball is in the zone that the veteran player is going to swing, make contact and turn this into a hit and run.
The only thing that can’t happen is that the batter can’t take a 95 mph fastball right down the middle for a called strike and set up the catcher with one of the easiest throws down to second of his entire season. Do you want to guess what happened?
Hyde used his final challenge as the Orioles manager but it was mostly out of frustration. There was no chance of this getting overturned.
5/16 – @ home – Finnegan/Ruiz – 95 mph 4S Fastball – challenged
CS #5 – Guilty – Bad Jump
This is a weird one. Holliday breaks for third before Bello begins his wind up allowing him to step off and throw him out at third. I don’t know if Holliday though Bello had started his windup or if he just thought he could just catch him sleeping but whatever the thought process it resulted in one of the worst TOOTBLANs of the season.
CS #6 – Innocent
This is one where I don’t think Holliday did anything wrong. It’s a double steal so it’s a play the Orioles are running, Holliday gets a decent jump and Jansen just throws a dart down the third baseline even with Westburg partially obstructing his path. Sometimes you just get caught.
6/17 – @ TB – Kelly/Jansen – 90 mph sinker,
CS #7 – Innocent
I would dare say Holliday got a good jump here and the throw isn’t even that good but Walls makes a pretty incredible catch and tag on Holliday’s foot. This is just one of those things like when you’re in a slump at the plate and you hit a ball 112 mph right into the pitcher’s glove as he tries to protect his face.
You could maybe say a better slide does the trick but from Holliday’s perspective the shortstop is leaping off the bag to catch an errant throw. I don’t think you can expect him to know he needs to worry about his toe getting tagged.
Mansolino challenges this one but it’s a bad challenge as Holliday is very clearly out.
6/29 – @ home – Bradley/Jansen – no pitch data lol – Challenged
CS #8 – Guilty – Bad Slide
This was just a tough sequence. Holliday should have had a double but he was slow out of the box. They send him with a full count and he gets got. His jump on this one was so-so but again with a full count the pitcher has an idea you’re going so it makes sense to not try to cheat on the jump but his lead was solid and he got a good pitch to run on.
You can see the throw from Murphy is not good and the shortstop has to jump to stop the throw from sailing into center field and yet he still has time to come back to earth and tag Holliday. I mentioned that we’ve seen Holliday get caught by some great throws and this was just not one of them.
This one has all the elements of an easy stolen base. Good lead, slow pitch and bad throws from the catcher and he’s out easily. Just tough. He does revert back to the feet first slide and I think that’s part of what gets him caught. It kind of looks like he was worried that the shortstop would land on him and went into the base a little timidly.
7/6 – @ ATL – Holmes/Murphy – 86 mph Slider
CS #9 – Innocent
This is one where I’d say Holliday is innocent. He gets a great jump, the slide is fine and he gets gunned down by one of the best throws I’ve ever seen.
8/6 – @ PHI – Romano/Marchan – 86 mph slider
CS #10 – Innocent
Another crazy foot tag?? The jump Holliday gets off Darvish is fine and the throw from Fermin is off line and Cronenworth just makes a great play. I suppose you could fault Holliday for having his foot way up in the air where Cronenworth could very easily tag it but again when you’re sliding into the base headfirst it’s hard to have the presence of mind to think I better make sure the defender doesn’t tag my foot.
It’s frustrating Holliday got tagged out this way twice but if he continues to attempt 30 stolen bases a year for the next 5 seasons I don’t think he’s tagged out like THIS more than 1 or 2 more times.
So it’s hard for me to say that he needs to work on avoiding being tagged out by catchers throwing the ball 10 feet up the line.
9/2 – @ SDP, Darvish/Fermin – 93 mph sinker – Challenged (SDP)
CS #11 – Innocent
Holliday’s last caught stealing of the season is another one where I will declare him innocent. You can see he gets a really good jump and is well down the baseline while the pitcher is still pulling the ball back in his motion.
It just so happens that the pitcher threw a 95 mph fastball high and outside and Kirk was able to basically treat it like a pitch out and they get Holliday with a good throw.
. 9/13 – @ TOR – Fisher/Kirk – 95 mph 4S Fastball,
Could you have thrown a better pitch to catch a batter stealing if you tried? I don’t think Elly De La Cruz gets this bag.
In case you’re not keeping track at home out of Holliday’s 11 caught stealings I credited him with 3 bad slides, 3 bad jumps and 5 innocent of all wrong doings.
Not to say that on the “innocent of all wrong doings” he should have been safe but that I didn’t see any sort of “mistake”. He either just got unlucky or just got thrown out fair and square.
I mentioned earlier in the blog that when you looked at the log of stolen base attempts it was clear that he was caught a lot more early in the season than late. So we knew that but by looking at each attempt we can see that the reason for this was that there were aspects of base stealing that Holliday was bad at early in the season that improved on the more he tried.
5 of the 6 “bad” attempts were within his first 7 base stealing attempts. The worst of the Jackson Holliday 2025 base stealing experience was early in the year.
As I watched all of Holliday’s stolen base attempts this season I found myself encouraged. As the season went on his jumps got better and he improved his sliding. In his first head first attempt back in May he was tagged out reaching for the middle of the bag and by the end of the season he was reaching for the back corner of the bag.
You look at the 17/28 ratio on stolen base attempts for the year and it looks bad but like with any stat if you struggle for the first 2 months of the season it’s hard to make your end of season numbers look good. I now feel confident that next season Holliday will not be the worst high volume base stealer in the league.
However there is still room for improvement. Even if you start counting Holliday’s stolen bases after he went 2/7 to start the year the number you get is 15/21 on stolen base attempts. That’s an ok but not good number and it doesn’t include the fact that Holliday was picked off several times during that 15/21 span.
Tracking pickoffs is difficult. It’s considered a base running mistake and not something that as far as I can tell is tracked by any of the major statistical outlets. At least not for the baserunners. I did a bunch of “Jackson Holliday picked off” searches and found video of 3 different instances where Holliday was picked off all in the months of June and July which would be during that 15 for 21 stretch Holliday had.
I’m certain he got picked off more than 3 times but I can only spend so much time searching for stats that nobody is keeping. If you know about a secret picked off stat database please reach out to The.Dishwasher1954@gmail.com .
So how can he improve even more?
To figure this out I decided to look at a couple of the better base stealers in the league who don’t have an obvious speed advantage over Holliday. Those players are Josh Naylor, Juan Soto, Cedric Mullins and Gunnar Henderson.
Here is each of those players sprint speed according to statcast
Jackson Holliday
Juan Soto
Josh Naylor
Cedric Mullins
Gunnar Henderson
3 of these guys had 30+ steals this season and Mullins has hit that mark in the past so we’ve got a solid group of base runners all of whom are slower than Jackson Holliday. So I want to look at what these guys are doing that Holliday could emulate.
Josh Naylor
Josh Naylor is not just a little bit slower than Jackson Holliday, he’s a lot slower than Jackson Holliday and yet he swiped 30 bags and was only caught twice all season.
It’s a disparity in speed and results that makes you ask the question; What’s going on?
When you watch Naylor steal bases it looks a lot different from what Jackson Holliday was doing all year.
Holliday takes his lead and holds very still until the pitcher begins his windup and then he picks up his front foot and pivots it towards second base and pushes off with his back leg. This is a very common technique and when we look at Mullins and Henderson we’ll see them both be effective base stealers using a very similar style so I’m not saying Holliday is wrong to do it this way.
But Naylor looks very different taking his lead at first base. In the images below you can see Naylor lurch towards second base while the pitcher is still set. It’s not an all out burst towards second but more of a hop step in the direction of second. He’s not fully committed to going so if Latz decides to try to throw over he can still get back.
Latz doesn’t throw over and instead starts his throwing motion. Naylor is already in motion and at this point he commits. Naylor flips his hips towards second and goes all out for the bag.
Latz is a lefty, is pretty quick to the base and is throwing a 4 seam fastball, all of which should make taking a bag off him pretty difficult but Naylor gets in there well ahead of the throw.
7/31 – @ home – Latz/Higashioka – 94 mph 4S fastball,
Let’s look at another example
This is actually an even better example of because Naylor frequently got such big jumps that there was no throw and that’s what you see here.
Naylor makes his first hop towards second while the pitcher is very much set. You can see in the images he almost clicks his heels together and then gets back down into an athletic stance. He notices the pitcher didn’t react at all and so Naylor dares to do it again. As the pitcher finally goes towards home plate Naylor breaks for second and is basically there as the catcher receives the ball.
If the pitcher had turned around while Naylor did his second hop towards second then he could be pretty easily picked off. For Naylor to feel comfortable doing this he must have felt out the pitcher and clocked that he wasn’t alert enough to catch him in the act. So this takes some know-how, you can’t just tell a young player “do two hops towards second then run” because they’ll get picked off.
Naylor had a great success rate doing this though and over and over as I watched his steals he was getting into second uncontested by a throw from the catcher all the time.
7/7 – @ SDP – Nunez/Diaz – 88 mph Slider
Juan Soto
Juan Soto is also not a fast runner and yet he led the National League in steals this year. I imagine it helps to be on base all the time but he went 38/42 stealing bases. That’s incredibly efficient! What’s going on??
Well if you take a look you’ll see something similar to what was going on with Josh Naylor.
We look at this first example and we see he starts in a pretty aggressive stance, so it’s not even like he’s pretending he’s not interested in taking second. This was also in the last couple weeks of the season so the scouting report definitely says “hey watch out for Soto trying to steal after you walk him!”
When Soto enters into his hop motion he’s actually partially turned towards second already which is different from Naylor who kept his hips parallel to the baseline for as long as he could.
Soto does one hop towards second while the pitcher is set and then takes off for second. The pitch is a fastball and the throw from Fermin is good and Soto still beats it.
9/18 – @ home – Marinaccio/Fermin – 95 mph 4S fastball
Next we’ll watch him take second off of Tommy Sugar.
Once again he takes a hop while the pitcher is set. If Sugano checks at just the right moment he’d have him dead to rights but he doesn’t and now as Sugano enters into his throwing motion Soto has a massive lead and takes off for second easily beating the throw.
7/10 – @ BAL – Sugano/Stallings – 79 mph curveball
Similar to with Naylor I watched many of Juan Soto’s stolen base attempts this year and there are several where Soto gets such a good jump there’s just no throw. They both use the hop step method to get good jumps and steal bases very efficiently.
I’m not trying to act like these two slow guys invented hopping around at first base. It’s something speedy guys have done in the past as well. However Naylor and Soto’s success demonstrates that speed doesn’t matter as much for base steal as feeling out if a pitcher is holding them on and taking advantage of any pitcher who isn’t vigilant.
The hopping allows them to test out the pitcher and how quickly he’ll throw over while still being able to get back to the base and once you’ve assessed where the pitcher is mentally you can decide if you’re going to hop your way to second base.
The Mets first base coach Antoan Richardson was credited with Soto and the Mets success stealing bases this year and a lot of that had to do with multiple players deploying this hop step technique. Even Cedric Mullins who was a perfectly good base stealer with the Orioles learned and used this technique in his short stint with the Mets.
The Mets are letting Richardson go this offseason and it could be hugely beneficial to the Orioles to scoop him up. He and Albernaz apparently already have a relationship so the path is paved for the Orioles to experience hop step glory.
Cedric Mullins
Mullins and Holliday are very similar speedwise but Mullins has years of experience being an effective base stealer. Like Holliday, Mullins holds very still at first base before pivoting his front foot towards second and bursting off his back leg. One key difference if you look at the still frames is that Mullins front leg motion is much less dramatic than Holliday’s.
I think this small difference helps Mullins be more effective than Holliday simply because he is just a little more efficient with his first move towards second base and that small movement is the is part of the difference between 22/26 and 17/28.
Below is Mullins with the Orioles doing his normal base stealing technique. If you want to scroll back and look at Holliday I think it’s a pretty noticeable difference how much Holliday picks that front leg up compared to Mullins.
4/3 – @ home – Houck/Narvaez – 83 mph sweeper,
Here is just an example of Mullins using the hop step technique after joining the Mets. Mullins went 8/8 stealing bases for New York.
9/6 – @ home – Singer/Trevino – 90 mph,
Gunnar Henderson
Gunnar looks really similar to Holliday with how he takes his lead and stands and he also has a similar leg motion that I explained was costing Holliday precious milliseconds of time. But Gunnar went 30/35 stealing bases this year so how does that work?
The big difference I see between Holliday and Henderson when stealing bases is the slides. Gunnar is a great athlete and it really shows in the slides. If you look at the examples below in the first example you can see him anticipate the tag and contort his body to make it harder for the fielder to get the glove on his torso.
In the second example the throw is up the line like we saw a couple times get Holliday in trouble with him getting tagged on his feet. However unlike Holliday you can see Henderson’s profile is low and tight to the ground so there’s no foot at the fielders eye level for him to tag. As a result the fielder has to pull his mitt down giving Henderson ample time to slide in safely.
I mentioned that Holliday improved his sliding throughout the season and that is true but he didn’t end the year as a finished product. More practice sliding head first into bases will help him control his body more and we’ll start to see him avoid tags rather than find ways to get tagged that nobody had thought of before.
That’s all I got. Overall I came away from this much more positive on Holliday’s outlook as a base stealer than when I decided to look into it.
The simple fact that Holliday has 28 more major league stolen base attempts than he did before this past season is valuable and it seems like over the course of the year he learned from some of him mistakes and got better.
There are still things he can work on to improve and I’d be very interested to see the Orioles try to emulate what the Mets did last season with getting their runners in motion more but even if they decide not to go that route I believe that Jackson Holliday will be able to steal 20+ bases without being thrown out 11 times.
By Nathan Skidmore
The Dishwasher 
Leave a comment