Statcast's New Toy and How the Royals Fare

Statcast has added some baserunning metrics to the toolbelt, so let's dig in to see how the Royals looked in 2024.

“It’s a simple game. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball.”

Bull Durham is one of my favorites to watch repeatedly, but Skip missed something. You have to run the bases, too. Now, baserunning isn’t quite as important as the other stuff. If you’re great at the other parts of the game, you can get by without being especially good on the bases. All we heard through the postseason is how bad the Yankees were at running the bases. They have an AL pennant to show for it. I’ll get to the new Statcast metric because that’s what this is mostly about, but of the top 10 teams in Fangraphs baserunning metric, five missed the playoffs and three finished below .500. But it still matters.

Earlier this week, Statcast publicly released their new way to track baserunning. It’s an overall run value that’s measured in runs created (or lost) via stealing bases and taking extra bases on the basepaths. You can click here to see how it works, but I’ll just throw a screenshot here. I do encourage you to check out the leaderboards yourself and play around.

As a team, the Royals were one of the best when it came to running the bases. They were nine runs above average, which was tied for fifth with the Dodgers and only behind the Brewers, Diamondbacks, Cubs and Reds. The top 10 here was similar to the top 10 from Fangraphs. Five of the 10 teams made the playoffs. Eight of the 10 teams were .500 or better.