No One Is Running on the Royals

No team has been caught stealing more than the Royals this year. As hard as it might be to believe, their 20 thwarted stolen base attempts are the most in the league. Their 70.1% stolen base success rate ranks 27th, as do their -2.1 weighted stolen base runs (wSB). This stands in stark contrast to what many think of as the Royals’ brand of baseball. After all, you’d have to go back to 2017 to find a full season in which the Royals didn’t rank among the top five AL teams in wSB, and all the way back to 2010 to find the last time their wSB was below league average. Thanks to players like Whit Merrifield, Jarrod Dyson, Adalberto Mondesi, Alcides Escobar and, most recently, Bobby Witt Jr., the Royals of the 2010s and 2020s developed a reputation as the most larcenous team in the league. From 2011-24, no team stole more bases, and no team racked up more wSB.

Kansas City’s stolen base supremacy hasn’t been limited to one side of the ball, either. From 2011-24, only two teams allowed fewer stolen bases than the Royals, and none caught would-be basestealers at a higher rate. According to the stolen base component of DRS (rSB), their catchers were twice as productive as any other team’s backstops in that period, while their pitchers were 12 runs better than the next-best team (the Diamondbacks) and more than three times as valuable as the next-best AL club (the Orioles). The Statcast numbers tell a similar story, although they only go back to 2016. From 2016-24, Kansas City catchers ranked second in both catcher and pitcher stealing runs. No other team placed within the top five in both metrics. So, you could make a pretty convincing case that preventing stolen bases is even more essential to the Royals’ brand of baseball than stealing bases, especially with the way things have gone in 2025. Their baserunners might be struggling to swipe bags like they did in the past, but their defense has taken control of the running game like never before.

The Royals have caught 47% of would-be basestealers this year. That’s the highest rate by any team in a single season since 2005, when Yadier Molina’s Cardinals caught 51% of runners. Over the last 20 years, only two other teams have caught even 45% of runners in a full season: the 2005 Twins, led by Joe Mauer, and the 2005 Tigers, led by Ivan Rodriguez. Seems like 2005 was a great year to be a legendary catcher.

Now, I should point out that Kansas City’s elite success rate has come in a pretty tiny sample. It would only take one more caught stealing to bring the team’s success rate up to 50% or one more stolen base to push it below 45%. In this case, however, the small sample isn’t a reason to ignore what the Royals are doing. Quite the opposite: The sample size is precisely what warrants our attention. They have played 57 games and 508 1/3 defensive innings in 2025. Only the Red Sox have played more baseball. Yet, in those innings, the Royals have limited their opponents to less than half as many stolen base attempts as any other team has allowed. The other 29 clubs have given up somewhere between 82 (Marlins) and 26 (Mets) stolen bases this year. The Royals have allowed only 17 stolen base attempts.

If this pace holds, the Royals will only see 48 stolen base attempts against them all year. Twenty-three teams have already allowed at least 48 stolen base attempts this season, and it’s not even the end of May. In 2023 and ’24, the first two years under the new rules to incentivize stolen bases, only one team allowed fewer than 100 stolen base attempts in a single campaign: last year’s Royals (86). Meanwhile, only two teams on our leaderboards (the records date back to 1956) have ever had opponents attempt to steal fewer than 50 times against them in a full season: the 1956 Braves (28) and the 1956 Pirates (46). I’m also more than a little skeptical of those figures, considering they’re both from the very first year we have the data, and the total recorded number of stolen base attempts by teams on offense in 1956 doesn’t match up with the total recorded number of stolen base attempts against teams on defense. All that is to say the Royals could be on their way to one of the greatest seasons of stolen base deterrence any of us has ever seen.

Let that sink in. The Royals have caught prospective basestealers at the highest rate in the league, even though their opponents have been pretty much unprecedentedly cautious. To put this in context, I whipped up a stat I’m calling “adjusted stolen base attempts per inning” (SBA/Inn+). As with all of our “plus” stats, a score of 100 represents league average, while 90 would represent 10% fewer stolen base attempts per inning than league average, and 110 would represent 10% more stolen base attempts per inning than league average. Two months into the season, the Royals have an SBA/Inn+ of 30. That means opposing baserunners have attempted 70% fewer stolen bases against the Royals than they have against the average team. That’s absurd! The table below lists every team that has finished a season with an SBA/Inn+ of 60 or below in the 21st Century. It’s not hard to see that the Royals are in a league of their own right now. They could allow stolen base attempts at twice as high a rate over the remaining four months of the year and still finish with the lowest SBA/Inn+ of any team in any full season this century:

One way the Royals have limited stolen base attempts that doesn’t really have anything to do with controlling the running game is they have simply prevented runners from reaching base in the first place. While their 508 1/3 defensive innings are the second most in the majors, they rank among the bottom half of teams (17th) in batters faced. Only three clubs — the Rays, Rangers, and Astros — have faced fewer batters per inning. Relatedly, Royals pitchers have held their opponents to the sixth-lowest OBP in the league.

With that said, Royals pitchers still rank among the top third of teams in batters faced with a runner on first or second and the next base open – also known as stolen base opportunities (SBO). So, I decided to make another version of an adjusted stolen base attempts metric, this time using SBO as the denominator. SBO is far from a perfect stat, since not all stolen base opportunities are equally likely to lead to an attempt. To try to account for that, at least somewhat, I weighted stolen base opportunities at second base 5.7 times more heavily than opportunities at third, because runners have been 5.7 times more likely to try to capitalize on opportunities at second this season. By this metric — let’s call it “adjusted stolen base attempts per weighted opportunity” (SBA/wSBO+) — the Royals stand out even more. Their SBA/wSBO+ is 27, or 73% lower than league average. They might be skilled at limiting baserunners, but that doesn’t have anything to do with how well they’ve been limiting stolen base attempts.

Another extraneous factor that often comes up in discussions about controlling the running game is pitcher handedness. In theory, left-handed pitchers should be better at preventing stolen bases because they have a clear view of first base from the mound. The Royals do indeed have quite a few lefties on their staff this year, including Cole Ragans, Kris Bubic, Noah Cameron, and Daniel Lynch IV. All told, lefties have thrown 39.2% of the team’s innings, the fourth-highest rate in the majors. Yet, the fact that the Royals have received about 60 more innings from left-handed pitchers than the average team can’t possibly explain everything that’s going on here. After all, eight of the 17 stolen base attempts against Kansas City have come with a left-hander on the mound. Indeed, and maybe I should have led with this, lefties aren’t actually any better than righties at preventing stolen base attempts, at least not in the age of disengagement limits. In each of the past three years, left-handed pitchers have faced about 26% of batters, and about 26% of stolen base attempts have come with a lefty on the mound. So, Kansas City’s southpaw-heavy staff can’t all take the credit for controlling the running game. Simply put, the Royals have just been really good at this.

The disappointing irony, however, is that the Royals aren’t far ahead of the pack in any measurement of stolen base prevention value. Their problem is that earning an extra out on the bases is a lot more valuable than preventing a runner from taking off in the first place. It’s hard to make the most of their excellent stolen base prevention skills when other teams aren’t trying to steal bases against them. Thus, according to Baseball Savant, the Royals rank 10th in catcher stealing runs (+1). They lead the league in pitcher stealing runs (+3), but the Guardians, Orioles, and Mets (all +2) aren’t far behind. Meanwhile, according to DRS, Royals catchers rank fourth with +2 rSB, and their pitchers rank second with +4 rSB. Those are all strong numbers, and the Royals have no reason to be unhappy. Still, it’s funny how they’re preventing stolen base attempts at such an elite rate, and yet it isn’t making much of a difference in any individual measurement of stolen base prevention value compared to what they’ve done in previous seasons.

Whether or not it’s making a meaningful difference in terms of value, there’s no doubt the Royals have done phenomenal work controlling the running game. What’s harder to figure out is how they are doing it. Salvador Perez and Freddy Fermin, who share primary catching duties in KC, are both excellent at preventing stolen bases. Perez has racked up +20 catcher stealing runs (per Statcast) since 2016, and keep in mind that he debuted five years earlier. His numbers have declined since his peak, but he has only had one below-average season over the last 10 years. His arm isn’t nearly as strong as it once was, though his exchange time has improved in his mid-30s. Meanwhile, Fermin has compiled +7 catcher stealing runs since his debut in 2022, and he boasts one of the faster pop times in the league. Yet, while both backstops are talented performers at this aspect of their job, neither wildly stands out from the competition by any individual metric. Moreover, the Royals were pretty darn good (though not this good) at limiting stolen base attempts in 2019, the year Perez sat out recovering from Tommy John surgery and well before Fermin debuted. This goes beyond any individual catcher.

It is similarly hard to find any number that clearly sets the Royals pitching staff apart, other than its overall Net Bases Prevented (per Statcast). Royals pitchers rank first in Baseball Savant’s Lead Distance Gained on stolen base opportunities, which measures how much ground runners gain on average with their secondary leads — meaning that runners are taking shorter secondary leads against them than they are against any other team. However, it’s not as if they’re all that far ahead of the next-best teams. In the same vein, the Royals are one of the quicker teams at delivering pitches with runners on base, according to Baseball Savant’s pitch tempo leaderboard, but they don’t stand out compared to any of the other quickest pitching staffs. What’s more, their average velocity on all pitches is the seventh slowest in the league, which should give their opponents more time to go for an extra base. Finally, they rank in the middle of the pack in pickoffs, with three from their pitchers and one catcher back-pick. There are plenty of stats to prove the Royals are skilled at controlling the running game, but frustratingly little to fully explain how they have been so uniquely successful.

Ultimately, I don’t think there is any one measurable explanation. A part of all this could be that the Royals are benefiting from a reputation that precedes them; opponents know how great their defense is at controlling the running game, so they aren’t even trying to run. The prophecy is fulfilling itself. Beyond that, I think the Royals are simply doing all of the little thing well, including the skills we can measure and, perhaps more importantly, the ones we can’t. Considering how consistently they have ranked among the top teams in stolen base prevention (not to mention stealing bases on the other side of the ball), this is surely an aspect of the game to which the organization devotes extra resources and attention. Kansas City might just know things the rest of us don’t. Stolen bases are on the rise for the third year in a row, but the Royals have found the cheat code to keep them at bay.