The Bases Atlanta Left Standing Still

Atlanta hit 204 home runs in 2026. Milwaukee, which won 103 games and the National League pennant, hit 154. Tampa Bay, the American League champion, hit 169.

Atlanta slugged .409. Those two clubs slugged .403 and .402. Atlanta's isolated power was .162 against their .144 and .143. Atlanta scored 742 runs; Tampa Bay scored 736.

And Atlanta finished behind both of them in wOBA and in wRC+, the two numbers that try hardest to say how good an offense actually was.

That is the paradox Demetrius Bell laid out at Battery Power on Thursday, and it is a real one. His headline asked whether Atlanta's offense has been left behind by a new wave in baseball, and he wrote it the way you write a question -- hedged where the evidence was thin, twice disclaiming the strawman that the answer is to stop hitting home runs and start bunting. He also put the difference in the right place. It is on the basepaths.

Baseball Savant's baserunning run value, which bundles what a club gains taking extra bases with what it gains stealing them, had Milwaukee at +8.8 in 2026 and Tampa Bay at +3.7. Atlanta sat at -4.2, 23rd of 30 clubs.

Bell got that mechanism right. Three things can be added to it, and the first of them is a correction.

Standing still

The correction is a sign. Bell writes that Atlanta was about one percentage point above average in how often it attempted to advance. Savant's own fields say the opposite: Atlanta attempted on 35.96% of its advance opportunities against the 36.95% a generic runner would have been expected to attempt from the same spots. That is 0.99 percentage points below, not above. His Milwaukee figure (+0.47) and his Tampa Bay figure (+1.33) are both right.

The sign matters, because it is the evidence for his own conclusion -- that Atlanta's gap was a matter of execution rather than aggression. The execution was fine. On the 433 advance attempts Atlanta made, it was safe 97.23% of the time. Tampa Bay, on 445 attempts, was safe 97.08%. Milwaukee was better than either at 98.34%, on 483.

Atlanta did not lose those bases getting thrown out. It lost them standing still.

The posts Bell pointed at are the right ones: Antoan Richardson is Atlanta's first base coach, Tommy Watkins the third base coach, the two men whose whole job is when to go. And there is an irony on file -- SI.com reported in March, when Walt Weiss replaced Brian Snitker, that one of the changes would be more aggressive baserunning. Nobody has said anything on the record about it since, and I am not going to tell you what anyone in that dugout believes.

Five bodies

Minus 4.2 runs is a number you can nod at and walk past. So here are the five Atlanta players who ran 200 or more competitive runs in 2026, with sprint speed ranked against all 612 players in the league file.

Michael Harris II, 27.7 feet per second, 55th percentile. Ozzie Albies, 27.1, 39th. Mauricio Dubon, 26.8, 32nd. Drake Baldwin, 26.0, 15th. Matt Olson, 25.3, 8th.

Not one above the 56th percentile. The league median is 27.5 feet per second. Atlanta's team figure, weighted by competitive runs, comes out around 27.0.

That is not a claim that the roster is slow. Austin Riley ran 28.0, comfortably above the median, and a sprint-speed reading measures one thing a ballplayer does rather than delivering a verdict on him. It is a claim about a lineup: Atlanta's most frequent runners were, as a group, below the middle of the league, and the fourth-most frequent of them was the catcher.

Thirty clubs

Bell did not run the league-wide test. That is fair; it is a day's work and a column is not. So here it is, all 30 clubs, 2026 regular season.

Link by link, his chain holds. Team sprint speed accounts for about 40% of the variation in baserunning run value across the thirty clubs. Faster clubs really do take more bases, and not by a little.

Baserunning run value then adds something about run scoring that batting quality does not already contain. Regress runs scored on wRC+, keep what is left over, and baserunning value tracks the leftovers at +0.56. The runs are real.

Then the last link.

Baserunning run value accounts for about 3.5% of the variation in 2026 win totals. Team sprint speed accounts for 0.7%. For scale, wRC+ accounts for roughly 36% of it.

One caveat I am not going to bury: wRC+ measures batting and excludes baserunning by construction, so the near-zero relationship between those two is partly a definition rather than a discovery. The three figures above are not. They are the ones that adjudicate the question.

Two more fences. These are descriptions of 30 data points in a single season, not a significance test; none was run. And I did not pull the multi-season trend, so nothing here says what baserunning used to be worth or whether its worth is climbing. The claim is about 2026.

The complete table makes the point more plainly than a correlation does. The best baserunning club in baseball was Washington, at +12.8, and Washington finished 77-85. Arizona was second at +10.1 and missed October at 86-76. Kansas City was ninth at +4.2 and lost 93 games.

The Dodgers were 27th at -5.3 -- worse than Atlanta -- won 100 games, and then ended Atlanta's season in four. Four of the 10 best records in baseball belonged to clubs in the bottom third of baserunning value.

Milwaukee is exceptional and should be called that: first in extra-bases run value, first in team sprint speed at 28.1, safe on 98.34% of its attempts, 832 runs scored. Tampa Bay is the softer half of a sample of two -- 10th in baserunning run value, 11th in sprint speed, 736 runs, safe per attempt a hair less often than Atlanta was. If a wave is being inferred from two clubs, one of them is mid-pack on the metric the inference rests on.

Rounding hides something in his three-season figure as well. He gives Atlanta a 2024-2026 wRC+ of exactly 100, 15th of 30, and calls that exactly middle of the road. FanGraphs' plate-appearance-weighted number across those 18,314 plate appearances is 99.9 -- fractionally below league average, a slightly worse story than the one he told. And the midpoint of thirty falls between 15th and 16th, so 15th is the better half. Tampa Bay's aggregate over those same three seasons is 99.0.

The date

Two weeks ago, working off four Division Series games, I wrote that the separator was the power column. Across 162 games it was not. Atlanta was seventh in slugging by value, ninth in isolated power, and its 204 home runs sit in a genuine three-way tie with the Dodgers and the Mets, spanning ranks seven through nine. The principle holds -- these are roster properties, assembled in a winter rather than found in an at-bat. The column I named was the wrong one.

Last week I measured the length of this winter. What this adds is what has to fit inside it, and it happens to be the least addable thing on the list. Slugging can arrive in a weekend. Speed is a property of bodies, and bodies come attached to years.

Bell counts six holdovers from the 2023 lineup and notes that only two of them are currently over 30. He is right, today. Olson is 32, Sean Murphy is 32, Riley and Albies are 29, Ronald Acuna Jr. is 28, Harris is 25.

Albies turns 30 on January 7. That is 76 days from now, which puts it inside this offseason rather than on the far side of it.

None of this is a franchise coming apart. Atlanta won 94 games, won the division, and scored more runs than the club that won the American League. The narrower and less comfortable version is the defensible one: this roster is built for one particular way of winning, that way is worth less than a World Series bracket makes it look, and the bodies it was built around keep a schedule of their own.

Baseball has a long memory. It also keeps a calendar, and the calendar is the part that does not wait for anybody to decide what to do about it.