The Milwaukee Brewers are close to etching a spot in the record books. In a year where the average team attempts 0.72 steals per game, they’re running 1.42 times per game. The closest the league’s ever come to that rate is 1987. That year, a combination of Vince Coleman, Harold Reynolds, and Willie Wilson tested the peripheral vision of pitchers and catchers league-wide.

Relative to league average in 2016, this year’s Brew Crew is way out in front:

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We’d like to welcome Ryan Pollack to the staff as the newest contributor to FanGraphs. Ryan has written for Camden Chat and Camden Depot in the past, and yes, we hired him just so Orioles fans would stop yelling at us about our projections. Please give Ryan a warm welcome.

The Kansas City Royals have been a high-contact, low-strikeout team for several years. Very few people saw this approach when the team was bad. But during their 2014-15 run, many noticed the team hardly ever struck out.

This bat-to-ball philosophy made great headlines because it opposed the trend of rising strikeouts. That the Royals succeeded in winning games made the contrast even greater. We remember Salvador Perez’s single past a diving Josh Donaldson that won the 2014 AL Wild Card game. We remember Alcides Escobar’s first-inning, first-pitch inside-the-park home run in Game 1 of the 2015 World Series. And we remember Eric Hosmer scoring the tying run of Game 5 on a weak Perez grounder to David Wright.

Put the ball in play, they said, and good things will happen.

That’s advice the 2016 Royals could use. Despite returning several members of the 2014-15 teams, this year’s iteration doesn’t avoid strikeouts well.

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