I think it is because for the most part bunts are off. Many times this happens when no one has reached base and there are 2 outs. You see the hitters stop bunting and swinging for gaps and we seem to produce.

Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but doesn’t our proficiency as a 2 out team mean we should not bunt as much? I mean, stats are cool (or for losers if you Coach Boom) but I think it is as simple as seeing how much we frustrate teams by scoring buttloads of runs with 2 outs.

1) Because this is all imperical data and not the result of some equation, is it possible that the results are skewed by the very situations that drive one to bunt in the first place? For instance, let’s say Augie can see the Matrix and knows that his batter in a particular situation has a 30% chance of getting a hit, but in this particular situation, only has a 20% chance of getting a hit. Therefore the cost of ordering a bunt goes down, but only the higher percentage is reflected in the stats above because those are the situations in which he actually swings away.

2) Is there an increased likelihood for an error fielding a bunt over a batted ball?

3) Does equating the numbers above to the specific that UT shouldn’t be bunting fail to take into account that most teams don’t practice bunting nearly as much as we do?

Oddly enough, although not a classic bunt, Ichiro essentially lived, until recently, off the swinging bunt. Parlin raises a good point, with a player like young Ichiro at the plate, you can small ball very effectively.

Thanks for the thoughts, though. Having a player that can bunt for a hit is a different situation altogether, of course, and is hard to quantify in a study like this. If we had any players attempting to bunt for a hit in the runner on 1st and no out situation I’m researching now, it will simply show up as a sacrifice bunt. I am counting the few bunts where the batter reached base as sacrifice attempts. This should theoretically help the bunting strategy in the study.

They don’t come around so often, but if you have someone who can “steal” a hit like this, it could be seen as advantageous (as Gate_of_Horn suggests, above) to increase the complexity of the situation for the defense.

Of course, all this depends on having a great bunter, and I’m guessing that that group heavily overlaps with those who can hit for percentages. Thanks for the post, by the way, and for following up these queries with further research.

The figures in the main post take that into account. The figures in my example in the comments section do not. Using the numbers in the main post for Texas in 2008, we see that a failed sacrifice with a runner on first took us from 1.35 runs per inning and a 59% scoring percentage to 0.96 runs per inning and a 38% scoring percentage (versus 1.12 and 56% for a successful attempt). So a successful bunt hurt us, but a failed attempt obviously hurt worse.

If a player attempted a sacrifice bunt in that situation, failing to execute cost us an additional 0.16 runs per attempt and 18% in scoring percentage. What that tells me is that a player that failed to execute a sacrifice bunt actually cost us fewer runs (0.16 fewer runs on average than a successful attempt) than were cost by calling for the sacrifice bunt in the first place (0.23 fewer runs on average for a successful attempt than no attempt). Their failed attempt did, however, lower the scoring percentage by more than the bunt call (18% versus 3%).