Some teams you know are going to hit dingers. Others tend to have great starting pitching. Traditionally, the Kansas City Royals have been a team that has done damage on the basepaths.

This is true at the micro level, as all four Royals World Series teams ranked in the top 10 in the league in total stolen bases. Three teams–the 1980, 2014, and 2015 squads–ranked in the top five, with the magical 2014 squad ranking first overall by a wide margin. This is also true at the macro level, as the Royals lead all MLB franchises since the 1994 strike with 3,532 stolen bases.

Stolen bases aren’t a great proxy for overall baserunning value; we’ll get into that a bit later. But they are a decent proxy for how much organizations emphasize baserunning as an aspect of offense, and it is very clear that the Royals value baserunning skill. So why does it seem like the Royals have been absolutely terrible on the bases, then? What’s going on?

The most recent baserunning mistake happened a few days ago in the Royals’ first game against the red-hot Red Sox. Down 6-0 after three frames and 8-1 after seven frames, the Royals started chipping back in the eighth inning after the Red Sox pulled Alex Bregman and Steven Matz. Kansas City scored four runs from a pair of home runs, a pair of doubles, a pair of singles, and a walk. But the inning ended unceremoniously, with Nick Loftin making an ill-advised attempt to score on a hard-hit Bobby Witt Jr. single to the shallow outfield.

Loftin was thrown out. It was not close.

It turns out that Loftin ran past a stop sign, but I don’t know if it’s all Loftin’s fault. In the video of the play, you can see Vance Wilson just sort of point at third base rather than throw his hands in the air and really get Loftin’s attention–the sort of thing that seemed to be warranted in that scenario. In any case, Loftin ran and was out. The Royals lost.

Significant baserunning oopsies tend to stick in our collective heads way more than baserunning success, so at this point it behooves us to look at the data to see if the Royals are truly as bad on the basepaths as it seems like they are. There are, essentially, three ways that you can look at the metrics.

Stolen base metrics: volume of steals, rate of success, all that good stuffOuts made on bases: how many outs were made on which baseBaserunning Runs: includes all possible baserunning metrics and assigns a run value to them

Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up. Baserunning value, or BsR as Fangraphs denotes it, is measured in runs above or below average. So far, the median team is at -1.3 runs; the teams at the top (Milwaukee, Texas, Tampa Bay) are really good, so that’s why the median is below the average. Kansas City ranks 24th overall in BsR at -4.0 runs, which is obviously not great.

So…you can close the book there if you want. The Royals are the seventh-worst team in Major League Baseball in overall baserunning value, ergo, they do kinda stink at baserunning. But this isn’t too interesting to me. Why are the Royals bad at baserunning? What do they do poorly?

This is where we go up to the middle part: Outs made on bases, which Baseball-Reference very broadly defines as any out made while making a baserunning play–anything that happens that is not a force play or fielder’s choice, in other words. At 28 outs made on the bases this year, the Royals are actually below the median of 31 outs made on the bases.

But when the Royals make an out on the bases, whoo boy, they make it memorable. No team has been picked off more; the Royals have been picked off 15 times, or about once every seven and a half games. They’ve also been thrown out at third base eight times, which ties a couple of other teams for the fourth-most in the league.

“Memorable outs on the bases” also transitions nicely into the third part: stolen base success. Because, at 71%, the Royals have the third-worst stolen base rate in the league. They’ve been thrown out 34 times, which is just a little under once every three and a half games; the other three teams who have been thrown out more often overall also have more stolen bases and a higher success rate.

I think two factors exacerbate the rotten baserunning vibes. One is that Witt is carrying so much water on his own. He’s a top-ten baserunner by overall value in the league and has been worth 4.8 runs on the bases himself. If he were merely an average runner, the Royals would be the clear worst baserunning team by value in the league. Furthermore, Witt has stolen bags at an 80.5% clip this year. That means that if Witt had attempted and stolen zero bases this year, the team would have a success rate of 67.1% which, you guessed it, would be the worst in the league if they were a team.

The other is simply that the Royals don’t have many opportunities to score. I get wanting to be aggressive. However, you can’t be too aggressive or you will run into outs, literally, along the way. This is what the Royals are doing.

Ultimately, yeah, the non-Witt division Royals absolutely have stunk at baserunning this year, and it has contributed to some offensive woes. It’s probably a shared responsibility. But considering how good many Royals teams have been running around out there, it has been jarring to see them not nail this part of the game.