Mariners trade has made a speed demon of one of MLB's slowest runners

There are some guys who you just know are going to take off when they reach first base. In the annals of Seattle Mariners history, this includes Ichiro Suzuki, Harold Reynolds, and....Josh Naylor?

This is not something I (or probably anyone else) expected to be writing just two weeks after the Mariners acquired Naylor from the Arizona Diamondbacks, but the stats are right there for everyone to see. The burly first baseman has swiped 10 bags in 12 games with the Mariners, which already ranks him fifth on the team for stolen bases.

Even more astonishing: Naylor has stolen four more bases than literally any other player in MLB since his Seattle debut on July 25.

Josh Naylor is showing the Mariners that you don't need speed to run

None of this makes any sense. Naylor is 5-foot-10, 235 pounds and he runs like, well, a guy who stands at 5-foot-10, 235 pounds. His average sprint speed is 24.5 feet per second, which is a career low and in the third percentile for all baserunners.

He is nonetheless 21-for-23 in stolen base attempts for the season, not to mention a perfect 10-for-10 as a Mariner. And nobody has a better explanation for it than a guy who has been teammates with Naylor in both Arizona and Seattle.

“He does not look that fast,” Eugenio Suárez says of Naylor, per Daniel Kramer of MLB.com. “But he’s always smart. He knows when to go. He reads the pitcher. He knows what kind of pitch he might be throwing in that situation right there, and he [gets] a really good jump every time."

The part about Naylor — who we're apparently calling "Big Grumper" now — being good at reading pitchers is actually quantifiable thanks to Statcast. When he was with Arizona, he gained an average of 3.0 feet between the pitcher's first move and the release of the pitch on all stolen base opportunities. With Seattle, he's bumped it up to 4.6 feet.

His aggressiveness on the basepaths would seem to be contagious. The Mariners have stolen a league-high 26 bases since his arrival, with 10 other players contributing at least one theft. It is effectively a reinvigoration of an offensive element that was there early on, but then faded as the season got into its middle months.

The not-so-subtle warning for other teams is that this Mariners lineup is not only as deep as they come, but multiple kinds of dangerous. They are fourth in the league with 120 steals for the season, and are also tied for third with 164 home runs. All of it should make their offense a nightmare matchup in October — assuming, of course, that they make good on the 84.4 percent chance that FanGraphs gives them to get there.

To this end, it isn't just Naylor's speed helping the cause. He's also pitched in three home runs, including a 450-foot tank that gave the Mariners an early lead on the Chicago White Sox on Wednesday. He's at 14 homers for the year, which gives him a shot at joining Julio Rodríguez and Randy Arozarena in the 20-20 club.

In the back of every Mariners fan's mind is the likelihood that the 28-year-old Naylor may not be around for long. He'll be a free agent at the end of the year, and he's certainly put himself in line for a hefty raise on the $10.9 million he's making this year.

For the meantime, there's a recommended way to enjoy his time as a Mariner: Don't blink, because you might miss him.