Growing up about 20 miles outside Toronto, Denzel Clarke received an early education in the art of the home run robbery. Every night during the summer, Clarke flipped on the television to watch the Toronto Blue Jays, specifically center fielder Kevin Pillar, whose ability to hoist his body up the 10-foot wall at Rogers Centre and steal would-be home runs from unsuspecting batters won him cult-hero status and an adoring fan who dreamed one day of mimicking him.
One week after making his major league debut with the Athletics in late May, the 25-year-old Clarke traveled home for a series with the Blue Jays. Rogers Centre had been gussied up since his childhood -- and the fence in center had shrunk by two feet -- but that did nothing to lessen Clarke's desire to do what his childhood exemplar did best. When Toronto catcher Alejandro Kirk smashed a ball to center field on May 30, Clarke burst toward the wall, dug his right foot halfway up, braced himself with his right hand and, for a split second, hung on the fence, like an oversized Elf on the Shelf. Perched firmly, Clarke casually stuck his left arm in the air, secured the ball before it breached the fence and returned to the field with one of the highlights of the 2025 season.
It was the 27th time this year an outfielder had stolen a home run from a hitter. There have been 42 more since. For anyone who has been inundated with seemingly nightly alerts of homers taken away and wondered whether robberies are growing more frequent in 2025, they are. Outfielders are on pace to surpass the record for robberies in a season -- 76, achieved in each of the past two seasons -- and it's not just superathletes like the 6-foot-4, 220-pound Clarke. He is simply one of the best in a generation that has responded to changes across baseball by making one of the game's most exciting -- not to mention valuable -- plays look easy.
"The more you play baseball, the more things become intuitive," Clarke said. "There's a quote I really like: 'Thinking merges with instincts and transforms into intuition.' When you play the game for so long, it becomes who you are."
Clarke forged that identity less than two weeks later, when he nearly flipped over the center-field fence at Angel Stadium while taking away a home run from Los Angeles Angels first baseman Nolan Schanuel. Within his first month in the major leagues, Clarke engendered Pillar-level admiration thanks to his incredible defense -- and, in particular, his recidivism at long ball thievery. Every inning presented an opportunity for Clarke to join the annals of home run robbers extraordinaire.
And that's the beauty of an occurrence that forces an entire ballpark to pause in unison, awaiting the outfielder's body language to tell the story. Hung heads connote failure. Blissful reactions abound at success, whether it's Ken Griffey Jr. sprinting away from the Yankee Stadium wall he climbed to filch a home run or Mike Trout pounding his chest after bouncing off the Camden Yards wall to burgle J.J. Hardy. Whether it was Gary Matthews Jr. pirouetting after robbing a home run with his back to home plate, Endy Chavez stealing a surefire Scott Rolen home run in Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS, Adam Jones taking one away from his then-Orioles teammate Manny Machado during the 2017 World Baseball Classic or DeWayne Wise saving Mark Buehrle's perfect game in the ninth inning, the history of home run robberies is rich and storied.
"Having one taken away from you -- you're thinking about it for a couple days," Diamondbacks outfielder Corbin Carroll said. "But then you're on the other side of the ball. There are just certain people that have an innate trait for being able to track both the wall and the ball. The quick look back, the proprioception -- to know where your body and the wall's at, keep your eye on the ball, then jump. It doesn't come across as difficult as it really is."
Thanks to shorter fences (in height and distance), a greater frequency of fly balls, better defensive positioning and less foul territory to cover, outfielders are redefining the robbery. They're not always as exciting as Clarke's pair, but in today's game, anyone with a sense of timing and respectable vertical leap can muster it. Of the 763 robberies tracked by Sports Info Solutions since 2012, left fielders have accounted for 209, right fielders 209 and center fielders 345. There's no advantage for familiarity -- 383 have been made by players at home and 380 on the road -- nor a discernible benefit difference between right- and left-handed hitters getting robbed.
All you really need is a dollop of courage and willingness to follow the rules of robbing a home run, as told by Clarke himself.
Rule No. 1: Prepare
Before every pitch is thrown, Clarke walks in a circle and reminds himself of the situation -- count, outs, who's pitching, who's hitting, where the catcher is set up, the body language of all the parties -- to glean as much information as he can. Because every one of those factors, he said, allows him to be where he needs to be if the opportunity for a home run robbery arises.
"The beginning is the most important, the cornerstone for the whole play," Clarke said. "Knowing the situation -- the pitcher on the mound, what type of hitter is at the plate -- dictates everything. If something breaks down at the beginning, it will be broken at the end."
Clarke's preplay routine wasn't always so locked in. His supreme athleticism usually made up for the areas in which he lagged. Effort can differentiate good and great, though, and Clarke never wanted to settle, so he dedicated himself to mastering the most granular fundamentals, even after he had earned a reputation as an elite center fielder.
"One thing I really worked on coming into this year is a preparatory step, like a tennis player or infielder," Clarke said. "I used to be flat-footed, which isn't bad. But since I'm a bigger guy, I need to create as much momentum as I can."
Clarke's constant movement borders on twitchiness, and yet he almost always finds himself in the same spot, 320 feet from home plate. It's eight feet farther back than the average center fielder stood a decade ago -- and still two feet short of the major league average this season.
The attention to detail is symbolic of the modern game. Never has there been so much information available and the best outfielders are taking advantage of it long before the ball leaves the pitcher's hand. More and more teams have positioned their outfielders deeper -- Milwaukee, the best team in baseball and one whose operating philosophies are steeped in analytics, has its center fielders stand a major league-high 330 feet from home -- in part to shorten distances to the wall.
"People are playing deeper," Carroll said. "If you ask an outfielder, it's a lot easier to run fast to your side or in rather than run close to straight back with your head turned tracking the ball. If you're deeper, when there's a ball where the wall comes into play, you don't have to be running full speed into it."
Every day when Carroll arrives at the stadium, in his locker is a sheet laden with information from fly balls the previous game: his jump times, his routes, the probability of a catch. The knowledge of each offers areas for tangible improvement. And yet they're just part of a whole sequence of events that needs to go right for a robbery to come to fruition.
Rule No. 2: Move in the right direction at the crack of the bat
Two steps. That's all it takes for Clarke to know where a ball is going to land the moment it leaves the bat. Perhaps this sounds farfetched. It isn't. What separates elite outfielders from the ordinary is the ability to run to a specific patch of grass -- or clod of dirt on the warning track -- based on a read from more than 300 feet away. All those little nuggets of information Clarke seeks before the pitch inform his route.
"A lot of things contribute to it," he said. "The location of the pitch. The type of pitch. If it's a breaking ball, it's going to backspin more. I don't mind quiet crowds, because I can get information from the sound it makes on the crack of the bat."
From there, instinct takes over. Clarke has always been fast, his childhood filled with lessons on efficient movement taught by his mother, former Canadian Olympic heptathlete Donna Smellie. Organizing his body in space got trickier toward the end of high school, when Clarke sprouted nearly six inches and "went through a phase where [he] was Bambi. No control. Figuring out how to sync up [his] body. It's taken some time." He went to Cal State Northridge to play in college and later linked up with Clance Laylor, a strength coach who helped him develop into a fourth-round pick by the A's in 2021.
Even in the time Clarke has been in organized baseball, outfielders have seen their duties increase as teams have leaned into a home run-heavy approach. From 2015 to 2020, the fly ball rate in the major leagues jumped from 33.8% to 35.7%. Since then, the increase has been even more dramatic, up to 38.5% this season. Already more fly balls have been hit in 2025 than all of 2015 -- and nearly 30 games remain in the season.
The emphasis on doing damage in the air has pervaded the game and made defensive wizardry in the outfield much more imperative. Brilliant young defenders have filled the vacuum, particularly in center field. The Chicago Cubs' Pete Crow-Armstrong, Seattle's Julio Rodriguez, Boston's Ceddanne Rafaela, St. Louis' Victor Scott II, Texas' Wyatt Langford -- all are elite defenders, and not one is older than 24.
Each has a signature robbery, too. Langford got Giancarlo Stanton. Scott got Juan Soto. Rodriguez got Fernando Tatis Jr. (who has a major league-best three home run robberies of his own this season). Rafaela got the carom of a ball his teammate Wilyer Abreu was trying to rob in perhaps 2025's most unique theft. And Crow-Armstrong ended a game and stunned the home crowd by snatching a Max Muncy moonshot back from the Dodger Stadium bleachers.
PCA CALLS GAME.
— MLB (@MLB) September 11, 2024
CATCH OF THE YEAR CANDIDATE? pic.twitter.com/cChYVrt8S0
As hyped as Crow-Armstrong was in the aftermath of the thievery, it didn't exactly surprise him. Like Clarke, he's a devotee to the rules of home run robbery, and his read off the bat -- 99.3 mph, 35-degree launch angle -- let him get to the right place at the right time.
"You just saw the height of the ball," Crow-Armstrong said, "and you kind of understood it right away."
Rule No. 3: A route needs rhythm
Major League Baseball's Statcast system can measure almost anything on the field, and in recent years it added every movement made by outfielders to its reservoir of numbers. Want to know who's best at coming in on a ball? Washington center fielder Jacob Young (who, like Tatis, also has three robberies this year). How about side to side? Crow-Armstrong, to both his right and his left. Tatis saves more runs going straight back than any outfielder.
Statcast also quantifies an outfielder's jump, based on his reaction time (the first 1.5 seconds of movement) and burst (the next 1.5 seconds) to help determine how well outfielders cover ground while chasing down balls. In those three seconds, Rafaela averages 39.3 feet, a full foot ahead of Crow-Armstrong, more than two feet beyond Clarke -- who's still top five in the sport -- and 10-plus feet beyond Michael Conforto, who ranks last among qualified outfielders.
If the jump at bat crack is about pure speed output, the next phase is a marriage of science and art. The science is about understanding trajectories, ball flight and the optimal route to the landing spot. The art is mastering pacing, timing, tempo -- and recognizing what course of action each fly ball warrants.
"If it's a high flier and you have the ability to time it, get yourself in rhythm to get to the wall," Clarke said. "But there are some balls hit way too hard to have time to think. So you're just going to have to get back there and do what your body tells you to do."
Rhythm, Clarke said, comes from toggling between tracking the ball in the air and running with conviction toward the anticipated landing area. Inside of Clarke's head, he tries to find the ball at least three times before attempting to catch it.
"There's a cadence when tracking a fly ball," Clarke said. "At the beginning, the ball is hit, and in my mind it feels like the clock is ticking. It's like boom, 2, 3, 4. I look back at the ball and there's more rhythm. How many looks I'm going to take depends on the stadium."
At Wrigley Field, for example, Clarke knows he won't be climbing any fences. Hidden behind the ivy on the outfield wall are layers of bricks. Between that and the height of the wall -- 16 feet in left field, 11 in center and 16 in right -- Wrigley is a dead zone for robberies, the only big league park without one since Sports Info Solutions started keeping track. Clarke is nonetheless awed by Crow-Armstrong: "He's so efficient with everything. You see him make some plays by the wall at Wrigley, there's just an innate feel there."
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Baltimore's Camden Yards, the host of a major league-high 69 robberies over the last 14 years. After moving back their left-field fence more than 25 feet and raising its height by six feet, the Orioles this year returned to dimensions similar to previous ones, including walls as short as 6-foot-11 at some points.
"Camden Yards' wall is low enough where you can actually kind of get up there," said center fielder Cedric Mullins, who spent parts of eight seasons with the Orioles before being dealt to the Mets last month and is tied with Young and Tatis for the big league robbery lead this season. "So robbing a home run does depend on the stadium. Because if the wall's too high, you're never going to do it. ... More walls should be lowered to make balls robbable. It's fun."
Rule No. 4: Do not fear the wall
No matter the padding, the ability to distribute force, the height -- as low as four feet at Dodger Stadium -- a wall is still a wall. It is intended to be sturdy, to stand strong as giant men hurtle their bodies into it. Walls are not for the faint of heart.
"It's all a mental thing," Clarke said. "I think the outfielders that separate themselves are the ones comfortable working by the wall. Everyone can get a good jump. Everyone can take a good route. But when guys get toward the wall, they get nervous.
"When I get to the track, I've made my final look. I know where I'm going to have to plant my foot on the wall. When I plant it, I'm putting it in and launching myself in whatever direction the ball tells me. The one at Angel Stadium I had to go more to my left than usual."
When playing in left field in Anaheim, where the wall is five feet, or right, where it's 18, the calculus is different. In left, there's no need to launch, and in right, there's launching to steal only an extra-base hit and not a homer. The eight-foot wall in center provided the perfect canvas for a robbery, and the distribution of robberies concentrated so strongly among center fielders has as much to do with the average height of their wall (8.4 feet) compared to left (10.3 feet, slightly skewed by the Green Monster) and right (11.4 feet, with four walls 20-feet tall or higher). The consequences of not knowing these dimensions down to the slightest detail can be dire.
"The challenging part is if it's going to hit off the wall, going to be right in front of the wall, shortly over the wall or quite a ways over the wall," Kansas City center fielder Kyle Isbel said. "You don't want to jump up on the wall and make a play if the ball is still on the field. The wind plays a huge factor in that, obviously, because you don't really necessarily know, but I would say the nice nights where there's not really wind, you have a pretty good idea of being able to do that."
As if the wall and the wind weren't enough, there are more factors to consider. While warning tracks attempt to serve their stated purpose, they are different in almost every park, from their composition to their size. As much as Clarke likes looking back multiple times, other outfielders find their target and sprint to it without so much as a glance. And then there's the issue of plant-foot confidence when outfielders try to Spider-Man a wall.
"Sometimes the cleat hits," Mullins said, "and it slips right off."
And, of course, you can't forget glove-squeeze fidelity, either.
"I've had a good amount of balls where I go up and rob 'em," Mets center fielder Tyrone Taylor said, "and I'm going so fast that when I'm coming back, it slingshots. The ball flies out of my glove."
All of the potential hazards remind that even as home run robberies near an all-time high, they're not some paint-by-numbers exercise. Stealing out of thin air a ball traveling at speeds around 75 mph by the time it reaches the fence -- after running at a dead sprint for 75 or so feet and contorting one's body-- is perilous.
"A lot of guys make it look super easy," said Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr., who spent most of last season in center field for New York. "It's harder than it looks."
***
Four years later, Clarke still hasn't seen a replay of what he believes is his best-ever robbery. It was March 21, 2021, his final year at Northridge. The Matadors were hosting a powerful Cal Poly team that featured future Mariners All-Star Bryan Woo, right-hander Drew Thorpe (who was later traded in separate deals for Juan Soto and Dylan Cease) and shortstop Brooks Lee, who would go eighth to Minnesota in the 2022 draft. In the eighth inning of a blowout, Lee smoked a fly ball to center. Clarke tracked it, scaled the wall and snagged it just in time.
Clarke doesn't believe video of the robbery exists, and that's fine by him. He knows there will be plenty more, and those will be captured and shared across social media. He's already among the14 players with multiple MLB robberies this season. Clarke, who is currently on the injured list with an adductor strain, has a long way to catch the leader since 2012, Trout, who has kept 14 balls from landing over the fence.
#OnThisDay: June 27, 2012
— Los Angeles Angels (@Angels) June 28, 2020
Mike Trout made a catch for the ages. Presented by @timelesshaskin. pic.twitter.com/bJmsMrLG0c
Being the robber certainly beats being the casualty. Twice this year Schanuel, Texas shortstop Corey Seager, Philadelphia outfielder Max Kepler, Atlanta designated hitter Marcell Ozuna and Seattle first baseman Josh Naylor have been victimized by robberies. It is a particularly unnerving feeling for those who enjoy robbing to realize they're experiencing the fear they generate in hitters that don't want to be on the wrong end of a highlight clip that gets replayed ad nauseam. Crow-Armstrong felt that pain six weeks ago, when he lofted a fly ball at Yankee Stadium toward the short porch in right field. The 6-foot-7, 282-pound Aaron Judge leapt, squeezed and thieved.
"I knew I'd have a chance," Crow-Armstrong said, "but then the power forward for the Knicks came and took it away."
The hard feelings from robberies never completely wear off. If you've been robbed, you remember. You carry it with you. And when you hit a fly ball that's in the rob zone, you hope that the outfielder gets a bad read or is feeling a little slow that day or fears the wall or the wind carries it just out of reach. Or, simply, that someone like Clarke isn't the outfielder waiting at the fence.
Some unfortunate hitter will be the next to place a ball where the A's outfielder can again put his rules to practice. And his reputation will only grow. Crow-Armstrong might win the Platinum Glove this season, and Scott might be faster, and Rodriguez might be flashier, and Rafaela might be on a better team, and Langford might be a better hitter. When it comes to robbing home runs, though, in a moment when it's happening more frequently than ever, there is an undisputed king, crowned after all of 47 games in the big leagues.
"That Denzel Clarke dude," Taylor said. "Whoa."
ESPN MLB reporters Jorge Castillo and Jesse Rogers and ESPN Research's Lee Singer and Garrett Gastfield contributed to this story