There are a few precious facets of baseball that seem to be disappearing before our eyes, lost in a billowing cloud of strikeouts, walks, hit batters and long fly balls.
For the most part, the bemoaning of these things is a little exaggerated. Singles, triples, batting average, double plays, assists and intentional walks are all still part of the game. They just happen to be at all-time lows and subject to recovery when the next stylistic cycle of the game sets in. The one exception to this hopeful thought is the non-pitcher sacrifice bunt, which truly seems to be on life support.
There have been suggestions that this era of offense is akin to the "goin' for the pump" 1950s, when home runs were king and stolen bases had fallen into a deep slumber. The comparison doesn't really hold up. Yes, teams are emphasizing home runs on offense above all else right now. However, the game looks very different than it did in the '50s:
Teams hit more homers now than they ever have and much more frequently than they did in the 1950s. They also strike out far more often, and that upward trend shows no sign of ebbing. Walks aren't as high as they were then. The end result is roughly the same: the collective OPS in the '50s was .726; in the 2010s so far, it's .730.
But we know all of this, right? For today, let's focus on the last two columns of that chart.
The SBA% column refers to stolen base attempt percentage, as a function of times reached bases. How often, when a player reaches base without hitting the ball out of the park, does he try to steal a base? The figure for the current decade is 62 percent higher than it was during the stationary 1950s.
The attempt rate remains well below what it was from the 1970s through the 1990s, but the success rates are higher than they've been since the 1930s, when attempts were at an all-time low. Steals per game have remained at the same level over the past four years, suggesting that whatever adjustments have been made because of the infusion of tracking data into the game have already been made.
This last part is the good news: The stolen base is alive and well, and teams have gotten really good at leveraging them as a key component of offense. This is an obvious byproduct of analysis. Now that teams are armed with everything from the catcher's pop time to the runner's sprint speed to the pitcher's delivery time, stolen bases have become a simple matter of arithmetic. They may not be as common as they were a generation ago, but they aren't going anywhere.
With that observed, here's a question: What would happen, in this age of record home run levels, if a team went all-in on stolen bases? Thanks to the Kansas City Royals, we may just find out.
The Royals are in the second year of a full-on rebuild and have had a fairly quiet offseason. Here's a summary of their winter acquisitions so far, per baseball-reference.com:
- Signed Michael Ynoa as a free agent.
- Signed Chris Owings as a free agent.
- Signed Billy Hamilton as a free agent.
- Signed Jason Adam as a free agent.
- Signed Terrance Gore as a free agent.
- Signed Kyle Zimmer as a free agent.
Adam and Zimmer were pitchers in the organization last year and, after being set free in a roster crunch, were brought back as depth pieces. Ynoa is a pitcher added for organizational depth. That means the key big league additions by Kansas City this winter consist of Hamilton, Owings and Gore. Here's what that trio has in common: They are really fast.
In fact, the Royals have built the fastest team in the big leagues, as things stand here a week into January. Using 2018 Sprint Speed scores from baseballsavant.com, weighted for expected 2019 playing time, here are the top projected team Sprint Speed scores for 2019:
Royals: 27.94
Phillies: 27.90
Rays: 27.78
Nationals: 27.69
Marlins: 27.63
These numbers do not include Gore, a career pinch runner who hasn't had enough observed opportunities in any season of Statcast to have a recorded Sprint Speed. But he may well be the fastest of all the Royals, who have seven expected contributors other than Gore who rated in the 77th percentile or better in 2018.
Last season, Merrifield led the majors with 45 steals. He also led the American League in 2017 with 34, the lowest total for a league leader since Luis Aparicio of the White Sox led the AL in 1962. That includes strike-shortened seasons. Last week, Merrifield told mlb.com that he could see the Royals stealing 200 to 250 bases in the coming season.
It might happen. Right now, based on the Steamer projections at Fangraphs.com, Kansas City is projected to lead the majors with 161 steals. But that's a conservative projection, based on what each player has done in past seasons. There's no way to know what the numbers might look like if manager Ned Yost morphs into a 21st century version of onetime Royals manager Whitey Herzog, or if K.C. leverages Gore's full potential as a pinch-runner, something that has never happened over a full season.
If the Royals were to get to 250 stolen bases, it would bring back to life a class of baserunning teams that has all but disappeared. Here's a list of 250-steal teams by decade:
250-STEAL TEAMS BY DECADE
1900s: 15
1910s: 19
1920s: 0
1930s: 0
1940s: 0
1950s: 0
1960s: 0
1970s: 2
1980s: 2
1990s: 1
2000s: 0
2010s: 0
That's five teams to hit the 250 mark since the end of the deadball era. Those five teams were the 1976 Oakland Athletics, 1977 Pittsburgh Pirates, Herzog's St. Louis Cardinals in 1985 and 1986, and the 1992 Milwaukee Brewers.
The Royals' club record for steals is 218, set in 1976 amid a four-year stretch when Kansas City stole 200 or more bases three times under Herzog. Perhaps not coincidentally, those were the best teams in Royals history, the 1985 and 2015 championships notwithstanding. In fact, there has been a strong correlation between stolen bases and wins in Kansas City ever since the Royals moved into Kauffman Stadium in 1973.
To demonstrate this, let me introduce another simple measure I'll call Steal Factor. It's simply how many bases a team steals in a season as a ratio of the big league average. An average stolen base team will rate as 1.00, below average is under that and heavy steal teams generally start at a ratio of 1.50 or better.
The Royals currently project for a Steal Factor of 1.96 in 2019, though as mentioned, that is a conservative figure based on 161 steals. It could be much higher than that, but even so, in context, 1.96 would be a very high figure. In fact, including 2019 projections, among 2,526 teams since 1901, that would rank as the 25th-best Steal Factor in modern baseball history.
The teams that rate above the Royals in this metric nearly all conjure vivid images to the history-mindful baseball fan. The top Steal Factor of all time is the 1949 Brooklyn Dodgers, whose 117 steals were nearly twice as many as any other team in the majors. Several of the Jackie Robinson-led teams from that era rate above the Royals' 2019 projection. The Maury Wills Dodgers from the 1960s are well-represented as well, as are a couple of the Herzog teams, the Go-Go White Sox of the 1950s and a couple of Rickey Henderson Oakland clubs in the early 1980s.
The most recent team to rank above the Royals' forecast was the 2007 Mets, the only team from this century to rank that high. That club, under Willie Randolph, stole 200 bases in a season in which the average team stole 97. Jose Reyes led the way with 78 steals.
In some ways, the Royals might seem to be trying to turn the clock back to the 1970s and outfox a collection of teams drunk on an excess of long-ball consumption. Really, though, Dayton Moore is simply re-establishing the template that has always worked best in Kansas City, one characterized by speed, contact hitting and defense. Now that he's got the speed part in place, and historically the Royals have won when they have that much more speed than the average team in a given season, the winning days are back in Kansas City, right?
Well, not likely. First off, we can stipulate that the Royals have a lot of work to do on the run-prevention side of things, even if their 2019 defense is elite. And it might be, with perhaps several configurations of the Kansas City outfield rating as the second-best defensive group in the majors behind Boston's primary outfield of Mookie Betts, Andrew Benintendi and Jackie Bradley Jr. But the Royals would need a stunning acceleration of their pitching staff rebuild in order to climb over league average on that side of things.
More than that, though, is that despite what looks like an unusually high potential for stolen bases, the Royals' offense projects to be one of the worst in the majors again. That's because the only category where K.C. looks to be above average is in steals, and that in itself is not nearly enough.
Using Steamer, along with Fangraphs' formula for projecting runs based on weighted on-base percentage, the Royals forecast to rank 27th in the big leagues in runs scored. Past Royals speed-based offenses that excelled had other key traits, namely the ability to put line drives into play and avoid strikeouts.
Rarely have the Royals featured patient offenses, and power-based offenses have never been a part of the K.C. way. Only once in club history have the Royals hit more homers than the average big league club. That was the 1977 team that also featured a Steal Factor of 1.62, drew an above-average rate of walks, struck out at a below-average rate and won a team-record 102 games. The Royals have also rarely fielded a patient offense, ranking better than average in walk rate just once since that 1977 team. That is one time (in 1989) in 31 seasons.
Well, this Royals team projects to finish in the bottom five in homers, walks and in strikeout rate, the last a clear sign that whatever the offense does this season, this is more about Moore establishing his club's time-worn style than actually winning with it. Only the Orioles project to have a worse team batting average than Kansas City's .243 mark.
That's all fine. This is early in the rebuild and even if Moore is trying to push this process along at a quicker pace than last time, no one expects the Royals to contend in 2019. More interesting is what this all-speed approach will look like on the field, through the prism of a league that just no longer plays the way the Royals are expected to play next season.
The key measure for the Royals, besides the raw steal total, may not be how many runs they score, but how many runs they score against how many runs they should have scored. That is, we can usually come up with a pretty accurate estimate of a team's run total based on its underlying offensive categories. Teams do deviate within a certain range from these estimates. One way to do this is to hit unusually well, or unusually poorly, in scoring situations. But another way is to leverage team speed into a higher-than-average percentage of baserunners who come around to score.
Historically speaking, teams with steal totals that occupy outlier territory generally outperform their runs created profile, sometimes to a significant degree. In fact, the degree to which teams are outliers tends to be connected to this effect. In other words, there seems to be an amplified effect for being a 200-steal or 250-steal team as opposed to a 150-steal team, even if that latter total leads the league. Historically, teams that have hit that magical 250-steal mark have scored about 31 more runs per season than would have been expected bases on their underlying categories.
That's a significant number, about three wins in a typical season. If you're starting from the standpoint of an 85-win team, then you're looking at 88 wins and a move from fringe wild-card contention into prime wild-card contention, depending on how stratified a league is in a given season. But that's just an average result. Two of the five teams that have hit 250 steals since the deadball days have scored 55 or more runs more than expected, those being the 1986 Cardinals and the 1992 Brewers. Now you're talking about an uptick of five or six wins.
The core question about the 2019 Royals: How high can they push that runs-vs.-runs created comparison? Twenty runs? Thirty runs? Eighty? Or, if their caught-stealing numbers get out of hand, might the effect end up negative?
Even given a best-case scenario, the Royals would probably only win three or four more games than expected based strictly on offense-based speed factors. When you're starting from a baseline of around 66 wins, that's not going to mean much in terms of contention. Of course, there are plenty of other parts of the game that could amplify this -- more balls put into play, a few more homers, a breakthrough on the pitching side, an outlier performance in team defense. Or maybe it all collapses and the Royals lose even more games than last season. Any of these scenarios feel plausible.
What might happen, though, is that the Royals learn something about how speed plays in the 2019 version of baseball and in so doing set the tone for what figures to be better years to come. The Royals are almost certainly not going to be very good next season. Nevertheless, they may be one of baseball's most interesting teams next season, at least for a while.
From the standpoint of the general baseball fan, some unexpected success for the Royals could be a great development for a game that has taken its share of slings and arrows for its on-field product the past couple of years. Kansas City, for better or worse, is trying something different. That in itself is commendable. But if it works, it might be a whole lot more than that.