Fantasy Baseball 2025: The State of the Steal — Drafting Stolen Bases in 2025

(It’s fantasy baseball draft season! The FTN Fantasy team and a host of helpful guests present our Ultimate 2025 Fantasy Baseball Guide. Check it out and prepare for the 2025 MLB season.)

A great part of the beauty of baseball is how timeless the pastime has been. Most of the rules we play by today were settled before the discovery of penicillin, and relatively few changes since have had a definitive impact on the field.

Of course, any mention of a change to baseball’s sacred rule book is bound to make the diehard purists pound their keyboards and seriously consider typing a strongly worded tweet @RobManfred (who is not even the real Rob Manfred), but as fantasy players it is our responsibility to adapt to the changing MLB environment no matter what comes down the pike.

So it was that prior to the 2023 season, Fantasy Baseball Twitter™ was all … atwitter … about the new rules to be implemented that year. The pitch clock was the clutchiest of the pearls (a clock…in baseball?), and we rightly considered how it could affect pitchers, but the other fantasy implication came from a few of the lesser evils that were going to be introduced: larger bases and limited pickoff attempts.

Everyone was saying the same thing: “This should make stealing bases easier.” They were right, but even the most optimistic projections were about to be blown away.

The State of the Steal

The Stolen Base Through History