It’s the most maddening and demonstrably ineffective strategy in baseball and has been for quite some time. So why do teams keep doing it?
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In the 1870s, just as professional baseball was getting its sea legs, there was an infielder named Ross Barnes who was really only good at one thing. At 5 feet 8 inches and 145 pounds, he had a smidge of pop in this deadest part of the dead-ball era, hitting six home runs in almost 500 career games, but where Barnes really excelled was bunting. As recounted by Bill James in his most recent Historical Baseball Abstract, Barnes made a career of being able to bunt balls that would land fair and then spin over the base lines and off the field. (In the rules of the day, this still counted as a fair ball.) And so it was that Barnes led the league in hits four times and batting average three times.
Ross Barnes would've loved playing for Dusty Baker, the 64-year-old Cincinnati Reds manager who, in an era when almost every player is at least something of a threat to hit a double or home run, still has a passion for the strategy of intentionally clunking the ball down softly a few feet in front of a defense that knows it's coming. (We're not talking here about using fast hitters to lay down a bunt against unsuspecting infielders. That's actually pretty good strategy!) Baker's Reds lead the league in "successful" sacrifice bunts (or, to put it another way, bunts that "successfully" give away one of the three outs teams get per inning), and they're in the top third of the league in sacrifice bunts by non-pitchers.
Through all the rule changes and improvements that baseball has implemented through 137 years of professional existence, the bunt has persisted. It's perhaps the strongest legacy of the game's small-ball origins. And aside from everything Alex Rodriguez does, there's perhaps no single act on a baseball field that engenders such ridicule and furor among dedicated fans. We've known for decades that its efficacy was wildly overrated even in earlier, less power-friendly eras, yet it persists: purposely sacrificing outs in critical game situations to move a runner one single base.
No current manager loves the sacrifice bunt more than Baker. A couple weeks ago, his Reds attempted four such bunts in a span of eight hitters. The outcomes were largely unsuccessful for the Reds, who lost in 16 innings. The sacrificial parade reached its nadir in the bottom of the 15th inning, when the Reds attempted what amounted to a suicide squeeze — Shin-Soo Choo took off from third, Chris Heisey tried to bunt — except that there were two outs, so if Heisey didn't make contact and Choo was toast, we'd go on to the 16th inning. (The inning also would've been over if Choo crossed the plate but Heisey didn't get to first safely to make the run official.)
So what happened? I'll give you three guesses, though you only need one:
Via wapc.mlb.com
The next morning, ESPN's Buster Olney ripped the Reds for their "bunt addiction," one of a few pieces calling out the team's buntalicious ways. But they're not only team with the habit: The Dodgers, Brewers, Nationals, and Giants sacrifice almost as much as the Reds.
The odd thing about the bunt's persistence is that neither data nor common sense support its use. First, the data. The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball is a tri-authored 2007 tome that's downright biblical among many sabermetricians. There's an excellent chapter called "To Sacrifice or Not." It's 50 pages of bunting analysis that builds on work first done by Pete Palmer and John Thorn back in the early 1980s. (Thorn is now the official historian of Major League Baseball.)
The Book is loathe to settle on universal conclusions — there are countless variables in a baseball game, and in some specific circumstances the sacrifice bunt can be the right play. But its authors make their opinion on the most common sacrifice-bunt situation plainly clear:
If the opposing manager is thinking about attempting a sacrifice (with a runner on first and no outs and a non-pitcher at the plate), tell him that you will gladly give the runner second base in exchange for an out. In fact, tell him that he has that option — in advance — any time there is a runner on first and no outs!
Using numbers collected over a 17-season span in the '60s and '70s — i.e., a LOT of data, not a small sample taken to speculative conclusions — Palmer and Thorn calculated how many runs the average offense scores in an inning given every possible game situation (no one on/no outs, runner on first/no outs, runners on first and second/no outs...). Most sacrifice bunts occur when there's a runner on first with no outs. In those situations the average offense will go on to score 0.783 runs. Let's say a sacrifice bunt in that situation is successful, as Dusty Baker hopes. Now you have a runner on second and one out. The average offense with a runner on second and one out scores 0.699 runs. The run expectancy has decreased thanks to the sacrifice bunt. Sacrificing an out to get a runner to second makes a team less likely to score, not more. (The specific numbers have changed as offenses have gotten more potent, but the gist remains the same.)
As Palmer and Thorn conclude in the book that accompanied their original data, "With the introduction of the lively ball, the sacrifice bunt should have vanished."
But ignore the data for a second. Let's just consider all the things that have to go right for a successful sacrifice bunt. First, you need a runner on first with decent speed. You might sub in a pinch runner if not. (Now you've really upped the stakes because you've essentially burned a bench spot in the hopes that this scheme works out.) Then the guy at the plate has to lay down a perfectly placed bunt — something that, even on bunt-happy teams, he's not getting a chance to attempt in competition more than once every few games. He can't pop it up, miss altogether, or accidentally hit the ball so hard the pitcher can still field it in time to get an out at second. Then, to score, you need to get another hit in the inning — in which you now have one less out to work with.
You'd think a scenario that's so contrived and complex and arcane would have to be worth the trouble and effort that goes into it, or else managers would stop calling for it. But that's simply not the case.