Total MLB stolen bases per season

The total number of stolen bases in Major League Baseball and the number of S&P 500 companies citing AI on their earnings calls have, between 2018 and 2024, risen together at a correlation of 0.978. This suggests a deeply American synthesis in which second base and generative models have arrived at the same ideology. The base is stolen; the future is automated. Nobody in either industry has agreed to anything.

MLB stolen bases per season climbed sharply after 2023, when larger bases and pitch-clock rules deliberately reintroduced speed and baserunning to the sport, rising from about 2,400 in 2018 to over 3,500 by 2024. S&P 500 AI mentions grew from under 100 per quarter to over 400 in the same window, driven by the post-2022 ChatGPT moment and the subsequent executive obligation to demonstrate AI posture on quarterly calls. Both trends are unrelated but both are products of recent structural change in their respective industries: rule changes in baseball, paradigm changes in technology narrative. They happened at the same time. They are otherwise strangers.

Six years of two lines rising together can describe two rulebooks being rewritten in the same era. The basepath and the earnings call are both getting faster. Neither is helping the other.