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Each offseason, we fill up these pages with transaction analysis. We dive into trades and free agent signings, qualifying offers, DFAs, non-tenders, Rule 5 selections, and minor league deals, and we even spare some time for manager hirings and firings. Rarely do we devote much space to the comings and goings of coaches. Even the most-prominent, big-name hitting coaches, pitching coaches, and bench coaches do their work almost entirely out of the spotlight. It’s nearly impossible to know what effect they have, if any, and because their heads are the first to roll when things aren’t going right, they come and go with alarming frequency. So when the Mets let Antoan Richardson, their acclaimed first base coach, walk to the division rival Braves in November, I never wrote anything about it. I had thoughts about the development, but not enough analysis to fill a thousand-word article. I settled for a 10-word skeet, and I wrote about Salvador Perez’s contract extension instead. Now that the Mets have been without Richardson, and the Braves have been with him, for half a season, let’s remedy that oversight.

In 2025, the Mets were successful on 89% of their stolen base attempts. That wasn’t just the best mark in baseball. The difference between the Mets in first place and the Cubs in second place was bigger than the difference between the Cubs and the Astros, who finished in 25th. Four teams racked up more than New York’s 147 steals, but because the Mets almost never got caught, Baseball Prospectus still credits them with putting up more base-stealing value than any team in the game.

Once you weed out teams with zeroes and blanks in their SB and CS columns, only five teams in our database have ever run a higher stolen base percentage than the 2025 Mets. But four of those teams played in seasons with incomplete statistical data (which inflates success rate, because it often doesn’t include unsuccessful attempts), while the other came in the short 2020 season and involved just 29 total attempts. The 2025 Mets were arguably the most successful thieves in major league history.

This probably isn’t news to you. We wrote about it kind of a lot. But maybe we should have made more of the fact that the 2023 Mets were at 89%, meaning they were the most successful team ever before they beat their own record two years later, and the 2024 Mets are 34th (out of more than 2,200) in our database at 83%.

Now, because of the 2023 rule changes, we have to take all of these numbers with a grain of salt. Although the league’s success rate has been falling since 2023, I’m not sure anyone has figured out how to compare base-stealing numbers from the Pizza Box Base Era and the before times. Regardless, even if we’re just talking about those three seasons, the Mets stand out in a major way. They twice ran the highest success rate in baseball by a gigantic margin, and they ranked fourth in the other season. Over those three seasons, their combined success rate was 87.1%. The difference between them and the second-place team is the difference between second place and 15th. And they did all this with a team that was slow as dirt. They turned the plodding Juan Soto, who had never stolen more than 12 bases in a season despite reaching base roughly as often as he breathed, into the National League’s stolen base champion. Their lack of speed kept their overall base-running value down, but for those three years, they were, out of nowhere, fantastic at stealing bases.

The other thing those three seasons have in common: They’re the three seasons in which Richardson served as the Mets’ first base coach. Richardson spent the three previous seasons as the Giants’ first base coach, during which time San Francisco ran an 80% success rate on steals, the fifth-highest mark in baseball. A year or two into his tenure in Flushing, Richardson’s title also grew to include “running game coordinator,” and in 2025, he looked like a genius. Statcast tracks the distance of each baserunner from the base at the moment the pitcher releases the ball during stolen base opportunities. When they weren’t stealing, the Mets were tied for the third-shortest leads in the game. They were extremely conservative. When they were stealing, though, they had the largest leads in the game by a huge margin. They always seemed to know when it was a good time to run. They didn’t just get good jumps. They got absurd jumps. They were off and running before pitchers even started their deliveries. It was comical. Sometimes it even looked like Richardson was simply standing near first and telling the baserunner when to take off. Here’s Soto bouncing toward second and then taking off right behind the back of future Met Freddy Peralta:

The Mets wanted to keep Richardson around in 2026, and Richardson wanted to stay. However, things got complicated. MLB teams are only allotted four coaching spots that come with pensions. The Mets reportedly offered a significant raise, but the two sides couldn’t come to terms on a salary, so they agreed that he could look for offers from other teams. Presumably, Richardson couldn’t find exactly what he was looking for, because at some point, he returned and asked for the same deal the Mets had already offered him. However, the Mets had already filled all their pensioned coaching slots. It’s unclear whether they didn’t expect Richardson to come back to the table, it was just a matter of timing, or they simply wrote him off after negotiations didn’t go their way.

The news that Richardson wasn’t just leaving, but leaving for a hated division rival, came as a bit of a shock. It triggered a lot more headlines and fan disapprobation than the average news about a first base coach. On the other side, the Braves were so excited that Michael Harris II told reporters that Austin Riley, owner of seven career stolen bases, would nab 20. I’ve been waiting impatiently to check in on the stolen base story for the two teams, and now that we’re at the halfway point, we’ve got enough data to start digging in.

The story is fairly simple in Queens. As everyone feared, the Mets running game did indeed collapse the moment Richardson headed for unincorporated Cobb County. The Mets currently rank 25th in baseball with 40 steals. According to Statcast, their jumps on steals have gone from the biggest in baseball by a mile to the middle of the pack. Their success rate has dropped to 66%, the worst mark in the game. With a steal against the Braves on Monday night, Soto is on pace for another 12-steal season. The Mets were probably due to suffer some regression to the mean after putting up the best stolen base percentage of all time, but they’re now arguably the worst team in the game at stealing bases. Statcast thinks they’ve put up the least value of any team on stolen base attempts, and ranks them 27th in overall base-running value. Let’s update that graph from earlier, shall we?

Oh, and let’s use our favorite statistical comparison one more time. The Mets aren’t just at the bottom in terms of success rate. They’re trailing by a lot. The difference between the Mets in 30th place and the Twins in 29th place is nearly the same as the difference between the Twins and the 19th-place team, which is… Antoan Richardson’s own Atlanta Braves.

In defiance of the Greek god of tidy narratives, Richardson has not instantly turned the Braves into a base-stealing juggernaut. Things are more complicated. The Braves have indeed gotten better jumps on their steals. In 2025, they averaged 23.6 feet from the bag at the moment the pitcher released the ball, 16th best in baseball. This year, they’re in ninth place at 24.7 feet. But they’re on pace for 86 steals, four more than the 82 they put up in 2025, and their success rate hasn’t changed too much. In 2025, the Braves ranked 17th with a success rate of 77%. So far this year, they’re at 75%. So the Braves are roughly in the same spot as they were last year, but before we move on, we need to note that they’ve taken a winding path to get to that same spot.

These pedestrian metrics are disguising the effect of a learning curve. The Braves started out very slowly this season, going just 14-for-22 on stolen base attempts in March and April. Not only that, but they started the season by getting picked off a lot. On May 12, their baserunners had been picked off 10 times, two more than any other team, and I chose that date specifically because the Cubs picked them off twice that night. In one game. It was bad enough that manager Walt Weiss was forced to discuss it with reporters. That’s the thing about Richardson’s anticipatory methodology. When it works, you look like a genius, taking off so early that the opposing catcher rarely even bothers to attempt a throw.

And when it doesn’t work, well, you look like this:

Perhaps opposing defenses got wise to Richardson’s early-breaking ways, or perhaps Atlanta just needed some time to pick up the nuances of such an aggressive approach. Since May 1, the Braves are 33-for-41, an 80% success rate that ranks eighth in baseball. And since their double-pickoff debacle on May 12, they’ve only gotten picked off once more. They no longer lead the league. Riley may not be on pace for 20 steals, but he’s already swiped a career-high five. The fifth came Monday night against the Mets. With Peralta on the mound, Riley broke so early and caught the Mets so completely off-guard that the catcher didn’t even bother with a throw.

I’m not predicting that the Braves are about to rip off a record-breaking streak like the Mets did last year, but it does look like they’re in a better place than they were earlier in the season. They’re definitely in a better place than the Mets.