Labels are a massive part of Juan Soto’s career, his current outlook, and quite literally everything tied to him. When you sign that contract he signed to join the New York Mets, it just comes with the territory. After seven seasons in the big leagues, it looked safe to assume we had this man figured out in terms of what he can do in any given season, the upside, and the floor. Then he goes out there and does something completely unexpected, like stealing 20 bases before September. In the words of the great Shaquille O’Neal, “I owe you an apology. I wasn’t really familiar with your game.” I thought I was, but it turns out that wasn’t the case.
Kyle Tucker has shown us for years that one does not need to be fast to be a prolific base stealer, and not only is Soto not fast, but he’s been slower than ever in 2025. Soto’s 25.9 ft/s sprint speed is nearly a foot slower than the 26.8 ft/s mark he put up last season, and it ranks him in the 16th percentile for the whole league.
Now, it’s one thing for a prolific baserunner since the start of his career, someone like José Ramírez or Tucker, to continue to run successfully despite being a bit slow. It’s something else entirely for an established player who isn’t particularly fast to dramatically increase his stolen base numbers in his eighth season with no history of doing this at this level.
You may wonder, well, he isn’t that fast, but maybe he is just getting better leads, and that’s also not the case.
So, if he is not fast, and he isn’t getting better leads than he usually did, he may just have thrown caution to the wind with this strategy? Wrong. Only two players have stolen 20 or more bases this season without being caught multiple times. These players are Trevor Story, with a 100% success rate in his 22 stolen bases, and Soto, who is 20 for 21 in stolen-base attempts.
One particular aspect of steals that’s often overlooked is the team context. While a team’s stolen base is largely affected by the profile of hitters it has, a good chunk of the final number has to do with the organization’s philosophy. On that front, the Mets and Yankees are quite different.
While the Yankees attempted 88 stolen bases in all of last season, 33 fewer than the league average for that year, the Mets already have 100 this year, while proving themselves to be one of the more efficient running teams, in large part thanks to Soto.
The trickiest aspect to tackle, and it’s primarily one of speculation, is the particular moment of his career. Even if he got hurt running the bases, Soto would’ve received a massive contract in free agency, but he also had every reason in the world to protect himself a bit more last season, and that could’ve meant running less. Still, he attempted 11 steals, which was around his career average prior to this season.
It’s difficult to get a grip on how much of this is sustainable. We could be back here next season, and Soto has five stolen bases, or are we to view him now as a perennial 15-20 steals player? For a hitter whose floor is one of one, the significance of this cannot be understated.
A pragmatic view of this situation is that the environment is unlikely to change, as the Mets are expected to retain the same coaching staff with much of the core (Pete Alonso, the big ?), and Soto will continue to hit second or third. The stolen-base-related numbers can’t possibly get any worse. Soto won’t be slower; he won’t likely take even worse leads, and the opportunities will be the same.
Often, when discussing star players and stealing, the argument is raised about how much one can gain for the risk they take, and it makes sense. When you try and steal a base, there is a lot that can go wrong, and not everyone is comfortable doing that. For years, fantasy managers were disappointed at Brandon Nimmo’s lack of a running game with his speed, but it was just not a part of his game.
As far as Soto is concerned, the Mets have a great incentive to keep pushing him to steal bases, in that he has been shockingly successful at it, a success largely predicated on picking his spots very well. Maybe it is a fluky year, and with pitchers more alert to his baserunning prowess, Soto’s success rate will come down in 2026. The point, though, is that he has all the incentive in the world to at least start 2026 vying for a similar pace.
Last season, at a very different level, we saw Shohei Ohtani’s outlier baserunning season, in which he stole 59 bases with an outstanding success rate, only caught four times. Ohtani has since come back down to earth and only has 17 stolen bases this season. The big difference here is that on that occasion, we had an enormous caveat that made it reasonable to predict this drop in stolen bases, Ohtani’s pitching. The Dodgers superstar was rehabbing without the pitching obligations that drain quite a lot of energy from him. It was widely expected that his stolen base numbers would come back down significantly now that he was set to return to the mound in 2025. Just how much we didn’t quite know. A lot as it turns out.
There are no assurances with Soto, but most signs point towards him becoming more of a factor on the basepaths in the following year. We’ll just have to see how that plays out. If he gets sick of running midway through next year and decides to stop, that’s his prerogative, and the Mets probably wouldn’t stand in his way or at least push back so much.
