The Mets Could Swipe Some Base-Stealing Records

Back in late June, I wrote about something weird happening in Flushing. In spite of being slow, and in spite of not being great at the other parts of baserunning, the Mets were threatening to become the most efficient base-stealing team of all time.

Well, exactly seven weeks later, the Mets are still slow. According to Statcast, they’ve got an average sprint speed of 27 feet per second, which puts them in a five-way tie for the slowest team in baseball. And they are also still not good at taking the extra base: Statcast ranks them 20th, while Baseball Prospectus has them at 15th. But if you’ve been watching the Mets for the last couple months, you know very well that they can still steal bases.

This week, I took another look at the numbers because a reader named Kevin submitted a mailbag question about Juan Soto’s newfound proclivity for stealing bases. We’ll get to Soto a bit later, but let’s start with the team as a whole. I wrote that article on June 26. At the time, the Mets had 62 stolen bases, which ranked 11th in the majors, and they’d been caught just 10 times. That was a lot of baseball ago, so now seems like a good time to give you an update. The Mets have 93 stolen bases, the 11th-most swipes in the game, and they’ve been caught just 10 times. They haven’t been caught since June 17! They’re 34 for their last 34!

I was focused on the all-time record for success rate when I wrote that first piece. I added caveats for the incomplete stat totals earlier in baseball history and about the way the disengagement rule has made stealing easier, but still, the Mets were challenging for the record. They were at 86.1%, which put them in eighth place, just ahead of the Cubs. Anyway, that was 31 consecutive steals ago. Let’s check back in on that leaderboard.

The Cubs have fallen off the pace. They’ve picked up 32 more steals, but they’ve also been thrown out seven times. The Mets now stand alone, and if we discount the 2020 A’s, who attempted just 29 steals over a 60-game season, then these guys have a pretty significant lead on the 162-game season leader, the 2023 Mets. I’m sure they’d love to take those punks down once and for all.

What do the 2025 Mets need to do in order to achieve that record? They could just stop stealing altogether, but that seems unlikely. After all, they’re in a playoff race, and if there’s a base for them to swipe, they’re going to try and take it. In the table below, each row shows the possible number of times the Mets could get caught stealing, along with the number of successful steals they would need in order to maintain their edge in success rate. They’re currently on pace for 126 steals and 14 failed attempts.

The Mets could regress a bit and still stay ahead of the 2023 version of themselves, but they’d pretty much need to keep this current pace in order to fend off the 2020 Athletics.

The good news is that the Mets have other records to think about. According to Stathead, their current 47-game streak without getting caught stealing is the fifth longest in history. The 2021 Giants hold the current record of 65 games, though the Mets have more steals now than the Giants did across their entire streak (26). In order to tie them, the Mets will need to avoid getting thrown out until September 2. Going another 18 games is certainly possible, but that’s a long time. The all-time record for consecutive stolen bases without getting caught is much closer.

This is a little bit harder to research, but as best as I can tell, the Mets are tied with the 2024 Cubs for the ninth-longest streak ever (or at least since 1969, when Stathead has full, accurate play-by-play data). With one more steal, they’ll equal the mark set by their arch-nemeses, the 2023 Mets. The current record belongs to the 2013 Red Sox, who ended the season with 39 straight successful steals. If you want to count the postseason, then you can credit Boston with 44. If you’re inclined to wrap around to the 2014 season but exclude the 2013 playoffs, then you can credit the Sox with 40. Regardless, 39 seems very much within reach for this Mets team, whose players never even seem to draw a throw when they steal.

It’s time to get back to Soto and revisit just how the Mets are doing this. He’s already got 18 stolen bases, half again as many as his previous career high of 12. If you watch SNY, you might have noticed that lately, Ron Darling has taken to saying, “I knew it,” when Soto takes off for second.

Darling knows Soto is stealing because he’s taking big walking leads that make it easy for even someone as slow as he is to swipe a bag. Once he gets out that far without drawing any interest from the pitcher, it’s academic. It’s been five steals and more than two weeks since a catcher even bothered trying to throw Soto out.

In both 2023 and 2024, Statcast had Soto was worth eight bases worse than an average runner, just on basestealing. This year, he’s four bases better than average. He still grades out badly in terms of taking the extra base. He’s slower than ever. He’s just magically great at stealing all of a sudden. In other words, he sounds a lot like the rest of the team. This is not just a Soto thing. This is a Mets thing.

Cedric Mullins provides a great example. He is an accomplished basestealer who has swiped at least 30 bags in three different seasons. He was 14-for-18 with the Orioles before being traded to the Mets at the deadline, but not many of those 14 steals looked like this:

“I don’t know what Mullins was doing as an Oriole,” said Gary Cohen after the play, “but the two steals he’s gotten for the Mets, he’s gotten those huge jumps, the way it seems that every Met basestealer does.” In those 18 attempts as an Oriole, Mullins’ average position when the pitcher released the ball was 24.3 feet away from the base. With the Mets, his average position is 27.9 feet away from the base. He has yet to draw a throw. When they’re attempting a steal, Mets baserunners are an average of 13.4 feet from the base on release. Statcast has numbers going back to 2016, and that’s the highest mark any team has put up in 10 years. When they’re not stealing, they average 11.2 feet, which ranks 279th out of 300. This huge difference indicates that the Mets know when they’re going to go. I won’t make you sit through it again, but please know that, just as I did back in June, I could easily pull together another big, long supercut of recent Mets stolen bases where the catcher doesn’t bother throwing and the announcer is saying, “What a huge lead,” right before the pitch.

The team is really doing its homework when it comes to pitcher tendencies. There’s no way for us to know, but I imagine this is a group effort, with analysts crunching the numbers on when pitchers do and don’t throw over, and coaches and video room personnel crushing tape to pick up on tells and tendencies. The public face of all this preparation is first base coach and running game coordinator Antoan Richardson. You might have noticed that the camera found him after Mullins’ most recent steal in the clip above.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not a group effort. Asked a few weeks ago whether stealing more bases was a point of emphasis this season, manager Carlos Mendoza said, “Not really.” He continued, “I think it’s just part of the personnel, the situations. Got to give credit to Antoan Richardson with his preparation, and then credit to the players. They are buying in and executing the game plan. We’re not trying any harder, the situation presents itself and we’re going to take advantage.”

Whether or not this all comes down to Richardson, he definitely deserves a lot of credit. Here’s one of Soto’s recent steals, off Logan Allen of the Guardians. Allen is left-handed, and he’s excellent at holding runners on. Statcast ranks him 16th out of all pitchers – that’s the 96th percentile – with five stolen bases prevented. (However, he only ranks in the 80th percentile among Logans, as he trails Logan Webb but leads Logan Evans, Logan Henderson, and Logan Gilbert.) Here’s the steal:

Soto doesn’t have a humongous lead. He’s going on the first move here. A few quick reminders: Allen is hard to steal off of, Soto is slow as dirt, this is the first inning, the Mets already have a lead, and stealing second only increases run expectancy by 0.1 runs and win probability by 1%. This is not really a situation where you go unless you’re positive you can make it. Why is Soto positive he can make it? I suspect it’s because he’s got help. Let’s zoom in on Richardson. Please ignore the fact that we’re also zoomed in on Allen’s now-gigantic butt in the foreground.

Richardson is repeating something right up until he sees that Allen is about to make his first move. After watching a million times and trying to read his lips, my best guess is that he’s saying, “Stay, stay, stay.” That is, as soon as he stops saying, “stay,” Soto is supposed to break for second. That’s only a guess, but whatever he’s saying, it’s clear he’s communicating something urgent to the player who’s about to steal. Richardson definitely doesn’t do this every time, but at least on the field, he often looks like the brains of the operation.

In less capable hands, these huge walking leads and early breaks are dangerous. They make it really easy to get picked off. We usually think of them as a high-risk, high-reward tactic, but the Mets seem to have removed all the risk. They’re not stealing all that often, because they’re only stealing when they’re sure the pitcher won’t step off or throw over. Maybe there’s some luck mixed in with all this preparation, but they’re in range of three records now, and it’s anyone’s guess when they finally get caught again.