As an initial stab, you might have guessed that since adopting the power-oriented offensive approach in 2019, the Braves have not been much for accumulating stolen bases. That’s fairly intuitive, but unfortunately, it gets somewhat upended by reality.
The Braves finished just inside the top ten in team stolen bases in 2018, and then again in 2019. 2020 and 2021 were low-steal years, but 2022 had the Braves as average, and they were inside the top ten again in 2023. Over the last two seasons, though, they’ve reverted to essentially a no-steal offense.
The above only figures for raw counts, rather than adjusting for opportunity and the like. That said, the pattern basically holds even if you use a more sophisticated accounting of stolen base value — basically, from 2018-onward, the Braves have alternated two-year stretches of “yes we steal a lot of bases” and “we have little interest in stealing bases.”
If we were using past experience as a guide, then we could say that the Braves’ accumulation of stolen bases relative to other teams in 2026 will depend on two things: 1) the health and willingness to run of Ronald Acuña Jr., who has right around a third of the team’s total steals since his debut, and whose relative lack of running in 2020-2021 and 2024-2025 is responsible for the large deviation in the Braves’ overall team rank in those years compared to 2018-2019 and 2022-2023; and, 2) the ability of Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies to reach base.
The other consideration is that by hiring Antoan Richardson away from the Mets, the Braves might be attempting to morph their offensive strategy to incorporate what happened with the Mets last year: lots of (successful!) steals despite a not very fast team footspeed-wise. In particular, the 2025 Mets were interesting because it’s not that they ran all the time — their steal attempt rate was average — but that they rarely made outs when attempting to do so, making it almost “free” to get an extra base. If the Braves follow suit in 2026 due to Richardson’s presence, then it may not be a volume play for them. That might take the pressure off Acuña’s health and Albies’/Harris’ OBP.
My guess is that the combination of the above factors pulls them into average territory, as they still won’t run very often but will have greater success in doing so, but this could really go any which way. What do you surmise at this point?
