When Major League Baseball introduced the concept of placing a man at second base with no outs in extra innings, I wondered if ballplayers would be able to resurrect the art of situational hitting? Here’s what I found.
A baseball traditionalist, I hoped that the second-base experiment would not last. Unfortunately, the experiment stuck. So, would players be able to bunt a man over? Advance that player on a ground ball? Execute the suicide squeeze? Loft a sacrifice fly?
They may still remember how to launch a sac fly (everybody is trying to launch the ball for a home run). However, what about bunting or making an out to advance a runner? That is a foreign concept to most professional ballplayers. Contact rates across the majors have been at a historic low, with MLB hitters making contact less than 80 percent of the time.
Before the DH became universal when adopted by the National League, Chipper Jones, a former NL MVP, World Series champion, and eight-time All-Star, told CBS Sports Radio that the state of the game leaves much to be desired.
Chipper Jones: You don’t see the fundamentals practiced all that much. Pitchers can barely get down bunts anymore. You’re certainly not asking one of your position players to do that. The hit-and-run, the straight steal, the days of guys stealing 75, 80, 100 bases a year and manufacturing runs so that you can win games 3-2 – everybody is sitting back and waiting for the two- or three-run home run that’s going to break the game wide open.
Jones added, “Look, it’s just the way the game is evolving. You’ve got a lot of smart guys who are heading up and general managing baseball teams now that never really played the game. But they’re relying on a lot of this information and a lot of this data to build their ball clubs. Some of them have done some great jobs over the last few years. Just like I tell hitters, there are a thousand different ways to hit a baseball, there are a bunch of different ways to put a ball club together – and this seems to be the hot fad right now.”
There used to be players whose trademark was bunting.
Brett Butler, when he was with the Giants (photo, WBUR)
–Hall of Famer Eddie Collins, who played 25 years in the majors (1906-1930), had 512 sacrifice bunts—the most in MLB history—to go along with 3,000-plus hits and over 700 stolen bases.
–Brett Butler, who played for the Giants and Dodgers among other teams, has the most bunt base hits in MLB history — 188. The outfielder reached base successfully on 48.8 percent of his bunt base hit attempts. He holds the single-season record with 29 bunt base hits with the Dodgers in 1992.
There are some current ballplayers who still honor the craft of bunting. Boston Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran, who had a 50 percent ground-ball rate in his minor league career, told FanGraphs, “I can’t beat out a fly ball. That would be a waste of my speed, so why not use the tool that I have?”
A skilled bunter, Durran had something to say on that subject: “Everybody wants to talk about hitting, but nobody wants to talk about bunting anymore,” he said. “The bunt is a lost art in this sport. Except for guys like Dee Gordon and Billy Hamilton, who can get away with it… I mean, bunting is harder than you think.”
He considers bunting a multi-faceted art form. “You’ve got the push bunt to third, and the one where you drag it past the pitcher toward the second baseman,” he explained. “And then you’ve got one that’s called ‘walk the dog,’ where you literally walk it down the first-base line and just have to beat the ball.”
John Maddon when he was with the Cubs (photo, LA Times)
There are also exceptions to the managerial approach of waiting for the long ball. Joe Maddon, who last managed in the big leagues in 2022, told ESPN, “In today’s game, everyone is working off the same sheet of music. I think there’s a reason why fans have been turned off a bit by our game. That’s because the game looks the same no matter where you go. I want to reestablish our own identity here.”
Angels’ owner Arte Moreno said, “You really get caught a little bit in the whole analytical part of the game. To me, you need to be in the fun part of the game.”
Maddon was not opposed to analytics, but also liked a balance between that approach and what he called the “heartbeat” approach, which includes gut instinct and small ball. He proudly declared that the Angels were “gonna bunt this year.”
So I wondered, would anybody be able to bunt the man on second over to third when the tenth inning gets underway? As Bruce Jenkins pointed out in the San Francisco Chronicle, bunting is “hardly an easy task against pitchers who throw 98 mph fastballs, sweeping sliders, nasty cutters and drop-off-the-table changeups.”
Retired Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz was optimistic. He told ESPN, “You get to extra innings and everybody’s trying to end the game with a home run. We won’t see that with the new rule, and I like that part of it.”
Sorry, John. Contrary to his expectations and mine, bunting has not increased in extra innings. In fact, leadoff batters are swinging around 89 percent of the time in extra innings. The clubs that embrace sabermetrics – all of them to some degree – don’t want to give away an out.
Taylor Bechtold put it this way in 2023: “While teams that choose to bunt have scored one run in the inning 46.4 percent of the time since 2020 compared to 33.1 percent of the clubs that don’t, teams that swing away have been more likely to have a big inning than those that have opted to square around.”
So pick your poison. The battle between traditionalists and sabermetric gurus continues.
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This article, which has been contemporized, first appeared in The Vacaville Reporter on July 7, 2020.
