The Royals' desperate need for speed has been holding their offense back this season

The late great Whitey Herzog (look him up kids) said, “speed never goes in a slump”. As a former Royals manager, the team has adopted that moniker as a rallying cry for decades.

Name any successful Royals team, and you can point to someone on that roster who personified that Herzog quote.

All four Royals’ World Series teams ranked in the top 10 in the league in stolen bases. In fact, the Royals lead the MLB in total stolen bases since the 1994 strike.

Since 2017, the Royals have led the league in stolen bases four times, more than any other team in the league. Last season, they were the only team with three players with 30 or more stolen bases (Bobby Witt Jr, Maikel Garcia, and Dairon Blanco).

Bobby Witt Jr continues to be a problem for teams to handle on the basepaths, recording his 30th steal for the fourth straight season. His 81% stolen base percentage ranks first on the Royals (who have at least 20 stolen bases).

That’s good, but everyone else has some explaining to do.

As a team, the Royals have lost that vital part of their winning formula, and the offense has taken a hit because of it.

Poor baserunning one of underlying issues weighing on Royals offense

The Royals have historically been a great baserunning team, but they’ve taken a massive step backward in 2025. They're 28th in stolen base percentage at 71.3 % as a team. Last season, they were at 80.3%, a 9% drop in production—the highest of any team in baseball.

For a team that prides itself on speed and changing the dynamics of the game with that added pressure, they've handcuffed themselves to a degree with their performance on the bases.

They lead the league with 15 pickoffs. You cannot overstate how this has affected the offense as a whole. The pain of getting caught stealing often eliminates momentum and keeps the offense stagnant.

The baserunning has to improve substantially for this team to have any business competing in the postseason, but more specifically, they need guys to steal bases successfully to jumpstart the offensive production.

Garcia leads the team, getting caught stealing nine times. That's good for a 69% success rate. Generally speaking, let's consider 75% or higher as a "good" metric and 80% as an elite metric.

Last season, the Royals got elite production from Maikel Garcia and Dairon Blanco, who both had a steal percentage over 80%. This year, only Witt Jr. is producing elite efficiency on the basepaths.

The drop in stolen bases production hasn't hurt the Royals' aggression, but it has lost the team runs over the course of the season. They're becoming less valuable on the base paths, and that is not going to be the formula for any Royals team.

Could a rookie help solve the Royals' baserunning issue?

Enter Tyler Tolbert, the Royals' rookie Swiss Army knife. While his .300 average at the plate in his last seven games is a sight for sore eyes, he has 14 stolen bases on the season in just 34 games.

The best part is, he's only been caught one time. That's nearly a 93% success rate, which leads the team. Tolbert stole two bases in the Royals' 7-3 win over the Red Sox on Wednesday, which salvaged the series for them.

The Royals need to find more success on the bases if they want to keep the offense from sinking the entire operation, as it did earlier in the summer. They don't have the added advantage of power to score more runs.

They win games with a keep the line moving approach that involves the entire team to contribute nightly. The best way to help a struggling offense is to get in motion.

The key will be to actually make it safe, which is easier said than done. That's on the players and the coaching staff to devise a game plan that helps them do that.

That could be analyzing a pitcher's windup down to the millisecond, to find the best time to take off. You can chart each pitcher's tendencies depending on the count. Figuring out when a pitcher is more likely to throw an offspeed or breaking pitch could unlock stolen base success.

Whatever that looks like for the Royals, they need to get on it. Playing Tyler Tolbert more is a start, but the Royals will need better instincts from the entire roster to make a difference in 2025.