Kevin Graber boarded a plane bound for Chicago and the American Baseball Coaches Association's annual convention in January of 2022. Not only was he attending the convention to listen to baseball coaches and other personnel lecture on their respective crafts, but Graber himself was also slotted as a guest speaker.
The official ABCA convention program outlined Graber's talking point as Systematic Chaos: The Control Freak's Guide to Deprograming Today's Robotic Baserunners. In layman's terms, Graber calls it teaching momentum steals.
"I had become fascinated with momentum steals in our offense,'' said Graber. "It is a new way of thinking about base stealing. The technique and timing are a bit different. The runner is actually off before the pitcher's leg lift. I became a part of this small coaching community across the country that is teaching momentum steals.''
Graber took to the podium in Chicago and introduced the baseball coaching world to momentum steals for nearly an hour. Mind you, this new concept presented itself when Major League Baseball was beginning to tweak some of its rules to make the game faster, which included the use of a pitch clock, and limiting pickoffs to two per plate appearance. In addition, MLB increased the size of bases from 15 square inches to 18 square inches in the hopes of creating more aggressive baserunning.
