Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

Context is critical when you measure the impact of bunting on the game. When in a game it happens as in the tying runs on and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth, which means you have two outs left, to how often over the course of the season a team bunts.

One of the writers made a good point, Ackley’s failed bunts don’t show up. He struck out ultimately and when you look at the stats on bunting, sacrifice hits over a season at season long stats for example by every team when measured actual successful sacrifice hits, ultimately it looks like random noise. In 2011 the Mariners had 5,856 plate appearances and 38 sacrifice hits. More simply, the M’s sacrificed a little more than once a week. The Red Sox scored more runs than anyone in baseball in 2011, with 875. They had 22 sacrifice hits.

In 2010 the Mariners had 42 sacrifice in 5,868 plate appearances. Looking at the Yankees and the Red Sox 6,323 and 31 sacrifices and 6,202 and 19 for the Red Sox. It is just meaningless and nothing more than a high anxiety release valve for the manager to grab when he loses all confidence in his players and must act like he’s affecting the outcome.

If you rank all the teams in the AL over the last three years by runs scored and contrast that number to total extra based hits and bases on balls it is very revelatory. The teams that score the most runs have the most extra base hits and walk the most. Amassing a bunch of singles does not matter.

Should anyone want to look at the last three years worth of stuff send me a note.

There are some times to bunt, but it should surprise teams, not be an automatic thing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2012 at 1:35 pm by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.