Rickey Henderson stole 1,406 bases. Lou Brock, in second place, stole 938.
The margin is 468, which is more than the entire career total of every player in baseball history except the twenty men above 500. Henderson could have retired the day he passed Brock's record and still be 468 steals clear of the field.
He was also caught stealing 335 times, which is the record as well, and that second number is the more interesting one. Henderson attempted 1,741 steals. Brock, second in that too, attempted 1,245.
Rickey Henderson, 1,406
Henderson played 25 seasons, from 1979 to 2003, across 3,081 games, and succeeded on 80.8 percent of his attempts.
That combination is the whole thing. Plenty of players have run at 80 percent. Nobody else has run at 80 percent 1,741 times. A basestealer who is caught often enough stops being sent, and a basestealer who is too careful never accumulates, and Henderson spent a quarter of a century at exactly the point where a manager keeps giving the sign.
He is also the all-time leader in runs scored with 2,295, and 26th on the career hit list, which follows directly. He led off, he reached base constantly, and then he was already at second.
The all-time list
| # | Player | SB | Career | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Rickey Henderson | 1,406 | 1979-2003 | | 2 | Lou Brock | 938 | 1961-1979 | | 3 | Billy Hamilton | 912 | 1888-1901 | | 4 | Ty Cobb | 892 | 1905-1928 | | 5 | Tim Raines | 808 | 1979-2002 | | 6 | Vince Coleman | 752 | 1985-1997 | | 7 | Eddie Collins | 745 | 1906-1930 | | 8 | Arlie Latham | 739 | 1880-1909 | | 9 | Max Carey | 738 | 1910-1929 | | 10 | Honus Wagner | 722 | 1897-1917 | | 11 | Joe Morgan | 689 | 1963-1984 | | 12 | Willie Wilson | 668 | 1976-1994 | | 13 | Tom Brown | 657 | 1882-1898 | | 14 | Bert Campaneris | 649 | 1964-1983 | | 15 | Kenny Lofton | 622 | 1991-2007 | | 16 | Otis Nixon | 620 | 1983-1999 | | 17 | George Davis | 616 | 1890-1909 | | 18 | Juan Pierre | 614 | 2000-2013 | | 19 | Dummy Hoy | 594 | 1888-1902 | | 20 | Maury Wills | 586 | 1959-1972 | | 21 | George Van Haltren | 583 | 1887-1903 | | 22 | Ozzie Smith | 580 | 1978-1996 |
Note how many of those careers are nineteenth century, and note that the rules were different: for part of that era a runner was credited with a stolen base for taking an extra base on a hit. Billy Hamilton's 912 and Arlie Latham's 739 are real under the rules they played by, and they are not counting quite the same event as Henderson's.
The column that does not exist
Here is a data problem worth naming, because published stolen base success rates frequently get it wrong.
Caught stealing was not recorded. Not partially, not inconsistently, simply not recorded at all before 1910, and then patchily until about 1951. It is complete from the 1960s onward.
So a table that computes success rate as steals divided by attempts will show Billy Hamilton, Arlie Latham, Tom Brown, George Davis, Dummy Hoy and George Van Haltren at 100 percent, and Honus Wagner at 98. None of those men were perfect. Their failures were simply never written down.
Any success rate quoted for a player who finished before 1951 should be read as an artefact rather than a fact.
The single season record
| Player | Season | SB | CS | Success | |---|---|---|---|---| | Rickey Henderson | 1982 | 130 | 42 | 75.6% | | Lou Brock | 1974 | 118 | 33 | 78.1% | | Vince Coleman | 1985 | 110 | 25 | 81.5% | | Vince Coleman | 1987 | 109 | 22 | 83.2% | | Rickey Henderson | 1983 | 108 | 19 | 85.0% | | Vince Coleman | 1986 | 107 | 14 | 88.4% | | Maury Wills | 1962 | 104 | 13 | 88.9% |
Henderson's 130 in 1982 is the record and it is also the least efficient season in the group. He was caught 42 times, which is more attempts than most modern players make in three years, and he still stole 130.
Vince Coleman's three consecutive seasons above 105 from 1985 to 1987 are the most concentrated run anybody has had, and his rate improved each year, from 81.5 to 83.2 to 88.4.
Nobody has stolen 100 bases in a season since Coleman in 1987. The highest total in the 38 years since is Henderson's 93 in 1988, and the highest by anybody else is Coleman's 81 the same year.
Tim Raines, and the efficiency case
Raines stole 808 bases and was caught 146 times, a success rate of 84.7 percent.
That is the highest of any player with 700 steals from the era in which caught stealing was fully recorded. Henderson ran at 80.8, Vince Coleman at 80.9 and Brock at 75.3.
The qualifier matters, and it is the same one from earlier in this article. Max Carey's record shows 738 steals against 92 caught, a rate of 88.9 percent, but he played from 1910 to 1929 when the failures were only sometimes written down. Ty Cobb's 83.4 percent has the same problem. Raines is the highest figure that can actually be trusted.
Against Brock the comparison is stark. Raines was caught 161 fewer times while stealing 130 fewer bases, which means he handed over far fewer outs for a similar amount of extra bases.
The modern consensus is that a stolen base is worth having only above roughly a 70 percent success rate, because a caught stealing removes a baserunner and an out at once. By that standard Brock's 75.3 percent was barely profitable and Raines was among the most valuable baserunners in history.
It took Raines until his tenth year of eligibility to reach the Hall of Fame, largely because the argument for him is made of exactly this kind of reasoning rather than a headline total.
The stolen base died, and then came back
| Decade | Steals per team | Success rate | |---|---|---| | 1960s | 67.5 | 62.5% | | 1970s | 100.0 | 64.2% | | 1980s | 120.2 | 67.7% | | 1990s | 112.9 | 68.3% | | 2000s | 93.2 | 70.7% | | 2010s | 90.8 | 72.5% | | 2020s | 89.7 | 77.7% |
Two things move in opposite directions there. Volume peaked in the 1980s and fell by a quarter. Success rate has risen every single decade.
That is not a contradiction, it is the sport getting more analytical. Once clubs worked out that a caught stealing costs more than a steal gains, they stopped sending marginal runners, which lowered the volume and raised the rate at the same time.
Then, in 2023, the rules changed. Bases were made larger and pitchers were limited in how often they could disengage from the rubber:
| Season | Steals per team | Success rate | |---|---|---| | 2021 | 73.8 | 75.7% | | 2022 | 82.9 | 75.4% | | 2023 | 116.8 | 80.2% | | 2024 | 120.6 | 79.0% | | 2025 | 114.7 | 77.7% |
Steals per team jumped 41 percent in one winter, and 2024's 120.6 is exactly the level of the 1980s peak. A rule change did in a single off-season what forty years of strategy had undone.
Who is closest now
The active career leaders, with the steal back at its 1980s volume:
| Player | SB | Success | |---|---|---| | Starling Marte | 363 | 78.1% | | Trea Turner | 334 | 85.4% | | Jose Altuve | 330 | 76.9% | | José Ramírez | 320 | 82.9% | | Christian Yelich | 232 | 84.4% |
Nobody active has 400. Henderson had 1,406.
The rates are the striking part rather than the totals. Trea Turner at 85.4 percent and Mike Trout at 85.6 are running better than Henderson ever did, and Turner has a quarter of Henderson's total after eleven seasons. The modern basestealer is more efficient and far less used.
Maury Wills, 1962
One more season deserves its own note, because it is the one that brought the stolen base back the first time.
Wills stole 104 bases in 1962 and was caught 13 times, a success rate of 88.9 percent that is the best of any 100-steal season ever. The record he broke was Ty Cobb's 96, set in 1915, and it had stood for 47 years in a sport that had largely stopped trying.
Look at the decade table again. Teams averaged 67.5 steals in the 1960s and 120.2 by the 1980s. Wills is the hinge. After 1962 the stolen base was a weapon again, and the run that produced Brock, Henderson, Raines and Coleman starts there.
Why 1,406 is still safe
The stolen base is back to its historical peak in volume, so the obvious question is whether somebody can now chase Henderson.
The arithmetic says no, and for a reason that has nothing to do with speed. Henderson's record required 25 seasons averaging 56 steals, and more importantly it required a club to keep sending him for 25 years. The modern game distributes steals across a roster rather than concentrating them in one leadoff man: teams steal as much as they did in 1985, but the individual totals that made up the 1985 number are gone. Nobody has reached 100 in a season in 39 years, and nobody but Henderson and Coleman has reached 80 in that whole span.
To pass Henderson from a standing start, a player would need to average 70 a year for twenty years. The rule changes made the steal profitable again. They did not bring back the player whose job was to steal.
Which leaves 1,406, and 335 caught, and a margin of 468 that would be a distinguished career on its own.
The back half of the stolen base list is where a round gets decided, because Latham, Van Haltren and Dummy Hoy do not come to mind quickly. Name a leaderboard against three outs in MLB Top 10 Quiz, or run a career one club at a time in MLB Career Path.