Ryan McMahon and the Kutina Club of Insistently Unsuccessful Basestealers (2024)

Today, we’re here to talk about Ryan McMahon, but before we can do that, we need to talk about Joe Kutina. Joe Kutina didn’t steal any bases in 1912. A 6-foot-2, power-hitting first baseman in his second season with the St. Louis Browns, that wasn’t necessarily his job. Kutina earned his spot in 1911, batting .374 with a .589 slugging percentage for the Saginaw Krazy Kats of the Class-C Southern Michigan League. He joined St. Louis at the end of the season, putting up a 96 wRC+ with three home runs in 26 games with the Browns. In 1912, his wRC+ dropped to 59 and he launched just one homer in 69 games. He also got caught stealing seven times.

I know that getting caught stealing seven times sounds like a lot, but things were a little different back then. In the 1912 season, 73 players got caught stealing at least seven times. Ty Cobb led the league with 34 unsuccessful steal attempts, and three other players also got nabbed at least 30 times. The difference is that Cobb and those three others combined for 203 successful steals. Kutina, once again, stole zero bases. That made him the first player in AL/NL history to get caught stealing at least four times without successfully stealing a single base in a season — or at least to be recorded doing so in that era of spottier record keeping. According to Stathead, over the last 112 years, just 216 players have replicated Kutina’s dubious accomplishment. Although that averages out to a bit below two per season, the distribution isn’t exactly even.

We’re only third of the way into this decade, but unless the pace picks up dramatically, we’ll end with the lowest total since the days when Joe Kutina was lumbering around the bases with reckless abandon. As it turns out, one of the changes wrought by the data revolution was an unwillingness to let players who were incapable of stealing a base keep trying and failing over and over again. This is why people don’t like analytics.

So far this decade, Nicky Lopez is the only player who has accomplished the feat, somehow getting caught five times without a stolen base in 2020. He’d go on to steal 22 bases in 23 attempts in 2021, so I might have to devote another article to looking into how he managed to fail so prolifically, especially during a 60-game season. For today, however, our topic is the one player who has already entered Kutina territory this season. Here’s the current list of steal-less players who have been caught at least twice, putting them on pace to join the illustrious Kutina Club of Insistently Unsuccessful Basestealers. For entertainment purposes, I’ve also included their sprint speed and its percentile rank. Curiously, four of them are (or were) third basem*n. And there’s our friend Ryan McMahon.

McMahon is nobody’s idea of a burner. Coming into this season, he had accrued -3.1 career baserunning runs. However, he was 24-for-36 in stolen base attempts, which comes out to a definitely-not-good-but-not-necessarily-disastrous 66.7%, and he’s stolen at least five bases in each of the past three seasons. This year, his 19th-percentile sprint speed, while not ideal, is his fastest since 2021. McMahon still has 102 games in which to steal a base and avoid joining Kutina on the graph above, but let’s look at what’s been going wrong so far this season. His first caught stealing came on April 9 against the Diamondbacks.

At first blush, it’s hard to put too much blame on McMahon here. Gabriel Moreno has an excellent arm, and since this is a double steal, McMahon needs to make sure that Ezequiel Tovar is actually going before he commits. On the other hand, the first baseman isn’t even holding McMahon. He knows the steal is on, and he easily could’ve taken a much bigger lead. Moreover, his jump is truly atrocious. He doesn’t start moving until Merrill Kelly is well into his leg kick and Tovar is in a full sprint.

This still frame tells you everything you need to know. Kelly’s left leg is at its apex. Tovar is already digging for third with his head down. McMahon hasn’t even taken his crossover step yet. His first step toward second won’t come until Tovar’s fifth step toward third. No wonder he’s out by a mile. He didn’t slow down noticeably, but it’s possible that he didn’t get up to top speed because he wasn’t expecting Moreno to go for the trail runner.

McMahon got caught for a second time on April 28, and it really is hard to fault him for this one. First of all, he was called safe on the field.

McMahon clearly beat Victor Caratini’s high throw, and it took a replay review to demonstrate that his foot had levitated off second base by a centimeter or two. Joe Kutina never had to deal with this garbage.

Rather than show replays during the review, ESPN cut away to a hockey promo, so we never got to see what McMahon’s lead or jump were like, but the situation makes a certain amount of sense. Framber Valdez is average to below average at holding runners, and Caratini’s arm graded out poorly in 2023 (though he’s been better so far this season). With two outs, McMahon waited until Valdez got two strikes against Elias Díaz with two straight curveballs, the second in the dirt. From 2020 to 2023, Valdez ran a 50% strikeout rate once he got to two strikes, way above the league average of 42.6%. His .229 OBP in those situations was also far better than the rest of the league. Why not take a chance, especially with another curveball likely? If McMahon were thrown out, Díaz would get a fresh chance the next inning.

McMahon’s third caught stealing came just four days later, and this is when things started to go off the rails. He took off in the very first inning. Clearly, he’s a you-miss-100%-of-the-shots-you-don’t-take kind of guy, which is an admirable attitude, but slightly less so when you’re missing 100% of the shots you do take. Once again, McMahon waited until there were two outs and two strikes on the batter, and then set off for second base. Unfortunately, he neglected to wait until the pitcher threw the pitch.

That’s not to say that he took off willy-nilly. Edward Cabrera tends to nod his head right before he throws a pitch, and McMahon must have thought he had him timed up. Cabrera had thrown over without nodding his head, one pitch earlier, so McMahon likely figured that he was unlikely to burn his second disengagement on another pickoff attempt. He took off when the brim of Cabrera’s cap dipped, but this time, Cabrera didn’t follow that move immediately with a pitch. In the absence of crowd noise for which Miami is famous, the television microphones picked up half a dozen people shouting, “Step off!”

After the rundown, the weight of his transgressions finally seemed to hit McMahon. He removed his helmet and cupped it in his outstretched hand like the skull of Yorick. Alas, poor McMahon.

Where be his gibes now? His gambols? His songs? His flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? He’s 0-for-3 in stolen base attempts, and those days of hilarity are long dead. McMahon hasn’t attempted to steal another base this season.

But he did get picked off just three days later, making him 0-for-4.

Coming with one out in the top of the eighth and the tying run at the plate, this was the most costly of the four plays. It reduced Colorado’s chances of winning by 11%. “Oh no,” groaned the announcers on both the Pirates and Rockies broadcasts. A replay showed that McMahon was simply fooled by what seemed like a very average pickoff move. Content that the ball was going to home plate, he shifted his attention there and started his secondary lead, then nearly fell to the ground when he realized his mistake.

With the inning still in progress, the broadcast had time to follow McMahon for the long, lonely walk back to the dugout. He trudged with his head down, looked up for just a moment, then lowered his head again and looked for a dark place where he could be alone with his dark thoughts.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s plenty of season left, and McMahon could turn this thing around at any point by somehow stealing just one base. Just one base, and Kutina Watch transfers its withering gaze to Nick Senzel and Jeimer Candelario.

More importantly, McMahon is having a career year at the plate. Thanks to huge jumps in both contact rate and contact quality, he’s slashing .280/.369/.463, good for a 123 wRC+. Not only is that a career best, but it’s also the first time he’s been above 95.

His walk rate is up, his strikeout rate is down, and he’s in the 95th percentile or better in terms of average exit velocity, 90th percentile exit velocity, and hard-hit rate. Joe Kutina was sent back down the minors after his 0-for-7 season, and he was out of baseball entirely after just 53 more games.

McMahon, on the other hand, is on pace for his first 4-win season while setting career bests in just about every statistical category. His previous best was 2.9 WAR in 2022. He’s been the subject of much trade speculation, but the Rockies have made it clear that they have no interest in moving him, and that’s probably for the best. He should probably just stay put from now on.