The Mets Are Slow, but They Know When To Go

The Mets are not the fastest team in baseball. Wait, let’s be more specific. With an average sprint speed of 26.9 feet per second, the Mets are the second-slowest team in baseball. When their baserunning makes the news, it’s rarely for a good reason. Maybe they’re costing themselves hits and extra bases by failing to hustle out of the box, or maybe they’re running the bases in the wrong direction altogether. Either way, you could be forgiven for thinking that baserunning is costing the Mets runs after seeing something like this:

In fact, the Mets have been the 10th-best baserunning team in baseball according to our baserunning metrics, seventh best according to Statcast, and 11th best according to Baseball Prospectus. What makes this contrast even more fun is that in addition to being slow, they haven’t been amazing at taking the extra base either. BP ranks them 15th on that front, while Statcast has them all the way down at 26th. They go for the extra base as often as you expect them to, but they succeed at a below-average rate. For all the sabermetric angst about how being a valuable baserunner is more than simply piling up stolen bases, the Mets are, in fact, accruing all their baserunning value by stealing bases. But they’re still not stealing all that many bases.

The Mets’ 72 stolen base attempts are tied for the 17th most in baseball, and their 62 steals put them in a three-way tie for 11th. I’m sure you see where I’m going here. All this value is coming from efficiency; the Mets are converting 86.1% of their stolen base attempts — the highest rate in baseball this season, and the eighth highest ever recorded. That’s right: The second-slowest team in the league is running the eighth-highest stole base rate of all time.

I don’t mean to be too dramatic here. I know the Mets are on an all-time top-10 list, but that’s to be expected. The league recently introduced rules that made basestealing much easier. They’re only one spot above the Cubs, who have been way more prolific on the bases, and fully half the teams in the top 10 are from the past three seasons. Still, I want to note a couple things about this list. The Cubs are the sixth-fastest team in baseball this year. Pete Crow-Armstrong, a top-15 player in terms of average sprint speed, has stolen more than a quarter of their bases. It’s not shocking that they’re up there. Further, the Mets appear on this list twice. In 2023, they were safe 88.7% of the time, the second-highest mark ever. The 2024 Mets rank 27th. Over the past three seasons, the Mets lead baseball with an 85.9% success rate, 2.5 points above the Phillies in second place. There really is something going on in Queens, and clearly, it’s not particularly dependent on speed.

Just to be sure about that last part, I ran some numbers. Like all teams, the Mets have their faster baserunners doing more stealing than their slower baserunners. I considered the possibility that they’re just only letting their faster players try to steal, but that’s not it. If you prorate team speed by the stolen base attempts of each player, their sprint speed moves up to 27.7 feet per second, which moves them from 29th all the way up to 25th. The Mets are just great at stealing bases.

I would really love to believe all of this is related to the team’s baserunning mantra, “Let’s Boogie,” coined by first base coach and run game coordinator Antoan Richardson. The Mets have been singing his praises over the past two seasons, but that is not particularly surprising. Light coaching hagiography is a staple of spring training coverage. Still, in this case, I am at least slightly inclined to believe the hype. “He’s one of the best I’ve ever been around,” said Juan Soto in April. “He’s really good at that – checking on pitchers, what they do and how we can jump at it, when we can be more relaxed. I’ve trusted him twice and got it twice. So I feel like he knows what he’s talking about.” Soto is on pace for a career-high of 18 steals despite being the third-slowest outfielder in baseball (minimum 10 competitive runs).

It’s not just that Soto has increased his stolen base total so dramatically. It’s what I saw when I watched all of his steals this season. I recommend you keep the sound on, but even if you don’t, it is very easy to see what’s happening here.

The common thread is Soto got enormous jumps. The catcher didn’t bother to throw the ball in half of these clips. The only time it seemed like there might actually be a play was when he ran on the Blue Jays battery of Yariel Rodríguez and Alejandro Kirk. Rodríguez grades out as above average at controlling the running game, and Kirk is one of the best catchers in the game at that particular skill. Soto is slow enough that he needed every bit of his big jump. There’s no universe in which he runs here unless he is certain he has something on Rodríguez.

The same thing goes for Francisco Lindor, who is currently on pace for 26 steals even though his sprint speed ranks slightly below the league average for the first time in his career.

Just like Soto, Lindor is getting enormous jumps. He has the pitcher’s timing down cold. Sometimes he takes off before the broadcast even cuts to the pitcher! The Mets are stealing bases in all the right spots, and you can see it in the numbers. Baseball Savant keeps detailed measurements of both primary and secondary leads, and most of the time, the Mets are among the most conservative teams in baseball. At just 11.2 feet, their primary leads rank 28th. Their secondary leads rank 17th, but when you combine them with the extremely short primary leads, by the time the pitcher has released the ball, they’ve traveled an average of 14.8 feet, the fourth-lowest mark in the game. But those are just the overall numbers.

Things are completely different when the Mets are stealing. They’re very nearly the most brazen team in the league. Both their primary and secondary leads rank second in baseball. They end up 25.9 feet off the bag by the time the pitcher releases the ball, trailing the first-place Padres by just under two inches. No team has a bigger gap between their average lead and their we’re-about-to-steal lead than the Mets. In fact, the difference is 11.1 inches, and no team is within even a foot of that mark.

Because the Mets aren’t getting picked off or caught stealing, we can see they’re making great decisions about when to steal. And because they’re getting huger leads and even huger jumps, we can see they’re extraordinarily confident in those decisions. To be clear, not every player on the team is getting monster jumps. Luisangel Acuña has elite speed, and he’s relied on it to go 11-for-12 in stolen base attempts even without enormous jumps. Still, the Mets really do seem to know when to go, and that comes down to coaching and preparation. Before you boogie, you’ve got to study.