Some teams you know are going to hit dingers. Others tend to have great starting pitching. Traditionally, the Kansas City Royals have been a team that has done damage on the basepaths.

This is true at the micro level, as all four Royals World Series teams ranked in the top 10 in the league in total stolen bases. Three teams–the 1980, 2014, and 2015 squads–ranked in the top five, with the magical 2014 squad ranking first overall by a wide margin. This is also true at the macro level, as the Royals lead all MLB franchises since the 1994 strike with 3,532 stolen bases.

Stolen bases aren’t a great proxy for overall baserunning value; we’ll get into that a bit later. But they are a decent proxy for how much organizations emphasize baserunning as an aspect of offense, and it is very clear that

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