The base-stealing technique that has Yankees looking ‘like Usain Bolt,’ and others following
Daniel Cobb
Published Apr 07, 2026
The numbers jumped out at him. Aaron Judge is known far more for hitting home runs than stealing bases. But when he noticed the high stolen-base totals of several Yankees minor leaguers in 2021, it piqued his curiosity and sparked his competitive fire.
“Guys I’m faster than had more stolen bases than me,” the Yankees’ 6-foot-7, 282-pound slugger said. “I wanted to know why.”
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The answer lies in a base-stealing technique that dates back more than 50 years, but only now is gaining wider acceptance in Major League Baseball. The Yankees, under director of speed development and base running Matt Talarico, are at the vanguard of the movement, and their timing could not be better. The league this season is introducing new rules, from the pitch clock to bigger bases to pickoff restrictions, in an effort to enhance base stealing and restore its prominence in the game.
The Bronx Bombers might never be known as the Bronx Burners. But their technique, used by Judge and other Yankees, in particular rookie Anthony Volpe, already has transformed the organization into a base-stealing machine in the minors. Other clubs, in baseball’s grand copycat tradition, are following suit.
“All you’ve got to do is watch Volpe and Gleyber Torres,” said one rival scout who has followed the Yankees for years in both the majors and minors, and was granted anonymity so he could speak candidly. “They look like Usain Bolt out there.”
Watch Judge, Volpe and virtually every other Yankee when they are in position to steal. They will take a short primary lead, then make a lateral, hop-like move as the pitcher begins his delivery. A “momentum lead,” the Yankees call it. Others term it a “leap/vault movement.”
Mike Roberts, a godfather of the technique, used to refer to it a “jump lead,” but now prefers “shuffle lead,” reflecting an adjustment in his teaching method in recent years.
Roberts, 73, the former head coach at North Carolina and father of a proficient base stealer, former Orioles second baseman Brian Roberts, works in player development for the Pirates. A maverick who teaches baserunning in his bare feet, he mentored Talarico, 39, who became a successful instructor at the collegiate level and an influence on high-school and college coaches. One of those high-school coaches was Bruce Shatel, 52, who relayed the technique to Volpe at the Delbarton (N.J.) School, and who refers to it simply as “new school.”
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However one describes it, the base stealer’s movement is not unlike the type an infielder makes to get set before a pitch, or a tennis player makes while preparing to receive a serve. The idea is to build momentum through motion, rather than start from a standing position.
As Shatel put it, “If you’re in a Ferrari at a stop light and I’m in my Toyota, but I roll into that stop and you’re at a dead stop, I’m going to beat you off the line 100 times out of 100.”
Technique alone is not the reason the Yankees led the minors in stolen bases in each of the past two seasons (they also were eighth in the majors last season, their highest rank since 2014, and through 9 games this season they were fifth with 11 stolen bases). Like most clubs, they have dedicated coaches who study video to identify deficiencies in pitchers’ deliveries, holds and looks, even in the minors. But now, with the two-pickoff limit, 20-second pitch clock with runners on base and increase in the size of the bases from 15 to 18 inches square, pitchers are at a greater disadvantage, making any advance in technique potentially more effective.
“In baseball, sometimes it’s hard for not just players, but coaches and everybody to do anything that might be a little bit different,” said Talarico, who made the jump from the college level to join the Yankees in the fall of 2019. “Now we have an excuse to look at some different things.”
Some in the game remain skeptical, believing the risk of a base stealer getting picked off increases when both feet are in the air. Judge acknowledged that concern, saying he was accustomed to staying in one spot, and that, “If I have any movement, usually that’s when they can pick me off easier.” But through practice, he has learned to trust the technique, while still taking his normal lead.
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Judge’s first meeting with Talarico was in Nov. 2021, after he saw the Yankees’ minor-league stolen-base numbers and determined he wanted to run more. In ’22, while hitting an American League-record 62 homers, he also stole a career-high 16 bases, and was caught only three times.
One early spring-training morning during their time together with the Cubs, Tim Cossins found Mike Roberts hanging upside down in the weight room, “like a bat.”
“There was nobody around,” said Cossins, a member of the Orioles’ major-league coaching staff who then was the Cubs’ minor-league field and catching coordinator. “He was just hanging there like he was meditating.”
Roberts, 73, spent six years with the Cubs as a roving minor-league consultant, starting in 2014. He still hangs upside down every day in spring training, a practice he adopted as he got older to increase his flexibility and improve his core strength.
“He’s wacky, nutty, awesome, loving, humble — everything,” said Jason McLeod, the Cubs’ former assistant GM.
Added Roberts’ current boss, Pirates farm director John Baker: “He’s crazy in all the right ways — obsessed. That’s what we love about him. If you didn’t put a limit on the amount of time he would be at the field, Mike would just camp right next to the dugout.”
Baserunning is Roberts’ particular obsession. A former catcher, he played two years in the minors after the Royals made him their 34th-round pick in 1972. During that time, while training at the Kansas City Royals Baseball Academy in Sarasota, Fl., he first learned about moving leads.
Roberts applied the concept at North Carolina, where he was head coach from 1978 to ‘98, and with the Cotuit Kettleers, the Cape Cod League collegiate summer team he has coached since 2004. He wrote a book in 2013, “Baserunning: Leads, Steals, Sliding, and More.” The Cubs, though, only let Roberts go so far, preferring him to work with individual players rather than implement his techniques throughout their system.
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The shutdown of the sport in March 2020 due to COVID-19 effectively ended Roberts’ time with the Cubs. Only a few years later, the team shifted its organizational philosophy toward what he teaches. Last November, the Cubs hired one of Roberts’ disciples, Kevin Graber, as their minor-league complex coordinator and manager of their Rookie League affiliate in Mesa, Az.
“I’ll probably take some of the blame (for the Cubs not applying Roberts’ ideas more broadly) in the position I was in,” said McLeod, who is now a special assistant with the Diamondbacks. “I don’t want to say it seemed too drastic, but it was probably something we weren’t ready to embrace as an organization . . . I wish I-slash-we would have given him a little more rope with that back then.”
Roberts went to the Orioles in 2021 and then the Pirates in ’22, maintaining his barefoot coaching style. He grew up in North Carolina dancing to the “Carolina Shag,” and equates the rhythm and footwork of great base stealers to great dancers. He also makes practical use of his shoes, using them to mark distances for his leads — 6 feet with his left foot, 7 or 7 1/2 with his right, shorter than the 9 to 11 feet generally employed in the pro game. A baserunner can shuffle a short distance, and then, if he chooses not to steal, shuffle back to the position of the shoes.
Roberts said he teaches shorter leads than the Yankees’ Talarico and some other current instructors because minor-league managers often are afraid to run, out of fear of losing their jobs. Short leads and short shuffles make it more difficult for base runners to get picked off, amounting to safer strategies.
The hopping and bouncing can be distracting even to right-handed pitchers, who might sense movement through their peripheral vision even when their backs are to the runners at first. The move, when timed properly, can be effective for all runners, not just the fastest and most athletic.
Henry Davis, a catcher who was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2021 draft, was the best at it in spring training among Pirates minor leaguers. “He just ran wild,” Baker, the team’s farm director, said. “If he played a different position, with his baseball sense and the way rules are now, he could steal 40 bases.” Davis said he had a head start: He learned the technique at Louisville under coach Dan McDonnell.
Baker, a former major-league catcher, joined the Cubs as a baseball operations assistant and mental skills coach after he retired, his tenure overlapping with Roberts’. He recalls a talk he gave to the Cubs’ coaches about communicating with the younger generation, and Roberts sitting in the back of the room, taking notes. Afterward, Baker asked Roberts why he was so attentive. “Man,” Roberts said, “you never stop learning.”
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And never stop teaching.
“Mike is on a back field with no shoes on, hopping around at his age, diving back into first base,” Baker said. “It’s that kind of passion that connects with any group of players.”
For all of Roberts’ coaching acumen, he initially taught the momentum lead only at second base, where a pickoff is less likely. His son, Brian, incorporated it at his own initiative at first during his junior year at South Carolina, then originated the practice in the majors during his 14-year career.
“I’m not saying Jackie Robinson didn’t move his feet a little bit,” Mike Roberts said. “But Brian was the first person I ever saw do the movement on a regular basis against right- and left-handed pitching at first base.”
Brian played two seasons for his father at North Carolina, stealing 63 bases his sophomore year. When UNC fired Mike after that season, Brian transferred to South Carolina for his draft-eligible junior year. By then, pitchers were onto him, slide-stepping to reduce their times to the plate. Brian knew he needed to adjust, to put himself in the best possible position for the draft.
Base stealing boils down to a math equation, the runner’s time against the time it takes the pitcher to get the ball to the catcher and the catcher to throw it to the fielder covering the base. After adapting his father’s teachings to steals of second as well as third, Brian stole 67 bases as a junior. The Orioles selected him with the 50th overall pick in 1999.
“What I learned is that even a tiny bit of extra momentum, the timing of a shuffle or something like that, creates probably an extra 4 feet of running, an extra tenth of a second you’re making up. Which then, all of a sudden, allows you the possibility of running on quicker times to the plate,” Brian said.
Brian tied for the American League lead with 50 stolen bases in 2007. All but seven of his 285 career steals came with the Orioles, making him the second-most proficient base stealer in franchise history. His career success rate of 79.6 percent was above the 75 percent baseline teams generally use when evaluating whether stolen-base attempts are worthwhile.
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As Brian evolved into a two-time All-Star, he noticed other players mimicking his style. Ian Kinsler told him, “Dude, I’ve watched you for years,” and became adept at using momentum leads to steal third. Jason Varitek, the Red Sox’s lumbering 6-foot-2, 230-pound catcher, mastered the timing well enough to occasionally steal second.
“He would be two hops in and gone and the pitcher had no clue, and he’s stealing second base and he runs like a Mack truck,” Brian said. “He would get us once a year and it used to drive me nuts.”
Brian, who retired after the 2014 season, reacted dismissively when asked if he wished he could play under the new rules. The pitching today is so good, he noted, only half-joking, he is not sure he could get on base. But the pitch clock, he said, gives base stealers an additional edge when timing pitchers.
Davis, the Pirates’ prospect, said his teams at Louisville initially used the momentum technique only at second base. But after the NCAA introduced the pitch clock in 2020, the maneuver became more viable at first. The restrictions on pitchers’ disengagements further tilt the equation in the runners’ favor.
“To me, it becomes even easier,” Brian Roberts said. “Before, they could hold and hold and hold and step off. They could do anything they wanted.”
In 2009, Matt Talarico attended the American Baseball Coaches Association convention as a coach on one of the lowest rungs of the collegiate ladder. Talarico, then 24, was an assistant at Heidelberg University, a Division III school in Tiffin, Ohio with an enrollment of about 1,000.
Both Mike and Brian Roberts spoke at the convention, which took place in San Diego. Talarico said he studied Brian constantly, showing video of him stealing bases to his players and asking them, “How does this guy, who is fast but not blazing fast, do this year in, year out?” After the convention, he mustered up the courage to call Mike, unsure the coach would even answer.
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Talarico had started laying the roots of his progressive ideas about base stealing at Heidelberg, at one point shoveling a 12-foot lane in the snow at the school’s football field so he could work with players. But in his conversation with Roberts, he showed deference to the older, more established coach.
“It was very much him giving me thoughts,” Talarico said, “and me wondering how I was going to try this and not get fired the next day.”
After two years at Heidelberg, Talarico spent one as an assistant at Toledo, five at Dayton and four at Wright State, a powerful mid-major where his players included Braves catcher Sean Murphy. His reputation as a baserunning expert grew. Like Mike, he wrote a book, released in 2019 and titled “The Complete Base Stealing Manual.” But he never expected to move to pro ball, where base stealing was in decline and his methods seemed unlikely to be embraced.
The Yankees made a spur-of-the-moment contact with Talarico in 2019, acting on the recommendation of Dustin Glant, whom they later hired as a minor-league pitching coach. Talarico, then at Wright State, arranged to meet with the Yankees officials at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, near I-70 between Indianapolis and Dayton. The meeting took place in a locker room. Yankees farm director Kevin Reese recalled it lasting four or five hours.
“I honestly have never been involved, in both that interview and the follow-up in Tampa, with somebody that was just so passionate about something,” Reese said.
Reese was intrigued by Talarico’s methods, including the jitters and flinches his base runners employed as a way of disguising their intentions. The Yankees executive equated those movements to “faking a blitz up the middle when you’re really coming around the outside.” In Reese’s mind, if MLB was going to experiment with new ideas in the minors, why shouldn’t the Yankees?
Talarico became one of several unorthodox hires Yankees general manager Brian Cashman has approved in recent years. In 2021, his first season after the pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 minor-league campaign, the Yankees not only led the minors in stolen bases but also in success rate. “That usually doesn’t happen,” Reese said. “Usually the more you run, you lose a little bit of success.”
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The Yankees again led the minors in steals last season while dropping to fourth in success rate (teams carry different numbers of affiliates; the Yankees had seven in 2021 and ’22, right around league average). The impact of Talarico was indisputable, quieting early detractors within the organization. Base stealing was not merely something major-league teams could find in the draft or college teams could recruit. It could be taught, too.
“His style certainly had his dissenters, like anything else new and different. The old guard was like, ‘What’s this? This is not going to work. You can’t do that.’” Cashman said. “Obviously, lo and behold, the proof is in the pudding.
“He has transformed our entire system and the major-league side has bought in as well. We’re better because of him. We might not be the most athletic team, especially at the major-league level, but we have the ability to play like we are on the basepaths because of Matt Talarico.”
The Yankees’ Volpe is not so much the poster child of the technique as he is a product of its evolution. On May 20, 2017, during Volpe’s sophomore year of high school, his team at Delbarton was trounced by powerful Malvern (Pa.) Prep, 10-3. Malvern Prep stole three bases that day; it seemed like more.
“They did Talarico’s system, more or less, against us. We had no answers for it,” Volpe said. “Right after that game, our coaches became kind of obsessed with it. They subscribed to his website, stuff like that.”
Shatel, the Delbarton coach, is friends with Malvern Prep coach Fred Hilliard, so he asked him, “How are you guys doing this?” Hilliard explained the work of Talarico, who was then at Wright State. Shatel learned that the system required training, and that implementing it would take time.
Volpe said he initially was “pretty bad” at the technique, working on it in Delbarton’s gym. A coach would stand in front of a player showing him an iPhone program. The program would count down three seconds as the player started his momentum lead, then flashed green for go or red for retreat.
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Shatel disagreed with Volpe’s self-evaluation, saying the shortstop by his senior year was “almost exceptional” with the technique, which not all of his players could execute. Volpe, though, said he became comfortable with it only after practicing every day under Talarico in the spring of 2021.
“It takes a lot of work. That’s what I think gets lost in it,” Volpe said. “But it’s not as crazy as maybe it looks. You’re not all-out gambling to go. It’s an athletic move that everyone should be able to do, if you do it the right way and you know where you are on the field.”
The Yankees’ secret, if it can be even called that, is out. Talarico notices other teams starting to use the technique, some after picking the brains of players they acquired from the Yankees. Players like the Pirates’ Davis learned it in college. Vanderbilt speedster Enrique Bradfield Jr., projected by MLB Pipeline as a top 10 pick in the 2023 draft, played for Roberts last summer in the Cape Cod League.
“It’s interesting to see this grow. Honestly, it’s pretty amazing,” Talarico said. “It may seem new, but there’s definitely a cult following that has been around this for a long time that I’m very proud to be at the forefront of, and I know Mike is, too.”
All Roberts wanted was to pass on his knowledge and keep base stealing alive. For him, the revival of the running game is practically a dream come true. He tracks the league-wide stolen-base totals, which through Sunday showed an increase of 48.5 percent from the same point last season. The success rate has also increased, from 74.6 percent in 2022 to 81.3 percent this year.
“The real backyard game of baseball is returning,” Roberts said. “We’ll actually have players with torn pants again!”
(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photo: Cole Burston / Getty Images)
