“Essentially, you are maintaining a high percentage probability of scoring by sacrficing. By gambling on getting a hit, you risk a double play, not moving the runner up, but you could move the runner to 2nd or 3rd with a hit. You have to look at it from the perspective that if you are at 1st with no outs, you could go from a 38% probabilty to a 25% probability if you fail to move the runner up. After that, if another out is made then you, for the most part, go down from there.”

That sounds fine, which is why I don’t mind if a really weak hitter like Fahey and Luis bunts. With mediocre hitters, I imagine it’s wash. In other words, the number of times it would benefit the team to use a sacrifice is washed out by the number of time you took a away a single or better. And with a good hitter like Markakis, sacrificing is probably detrimental as you mention.

This is a similar thing to all that "OzzieBall" bullshit when the White Sox won the WS. People attributed their win to smart, small ball, when really they had amazing pitching with career years from like three guys. Giving ABs to Podsednik didn’t even hurt enough to screw that up.

Plus I don’t know if they were playing small ball. They bunting Pods over a lot but they had Konerko, Thome, and I believe Dye who were slugging the shit out of the ball.

They have scored a bunch of runs, 172 to be exact.
They have scored 10 runs or more in 5 games. 5-0 in those games. A total of 63 runs scored in just 5 games. That leaves 109 runs for the other 31 games.
They have been shut out 5 times. 0-5.
They have been held to 1 run 5 times. 0-5.
They have been held to 2 or 3 runs 7 times. 0-7.
Nearly half their games they have scored 3 runs or less and are 0-17 in those games. In 5 games they have scored 10 or more runs. 5-17. Oh yeah, I’m impressed so far. The rest of their games they are 10-4. Unless their offense scores 5 runs, they don’t win, and they have done that in exactly half of their games. They hold a record of 15-21.

So the chart says a team on first with no outs scores .95 runs while a team with a guy on second scores .72 runs. Being the dim bulb I am, it still looks like being on first with no outs is a better opportunity than being on second with one. Why would you pass up the opportunity of a guy on first with one out by (if all goes well) deliberately changing the situation to a guy on second with no outs? That still doesn’t make sense to me.

I read a series of articles James Click wrote for Baseball Prospectus a few years back about sacrifice bunts and they seemed to rely on my interpretation of the run matrix as do a number of other baseball writers who know more than I do. He thought that in most situations (except for a pitcher or Mark Belanger-type hitter) bunting a guy over costs a team runs.

I know you have your own statistics you’ve developed based on your analysis of the play-by-play data from 1974 to 1990 provided by Retrosheet and software provided by Ray Kerby that you’ve quoted heavily, but frankly I’m going to listen to the Baseball Prospectus guys before I listen to you.

Why do so many Sabermetric types advise against the sacrifice bunt if it’s been proven it works? My friend works at the Elias Sports Bureau and he said in his simulations most pitchers shouldn’t even bunt. The Elias Sports Bureau does statistical work-ups for every Major League team. How is that if they’re so fundamentally wrong? How come so many people who obsess over numbers believe small ball doesn’t work if it has been proven it has? Who proved it? Did you prove it? Have you told anyone? Would you like my friend’s e-mail address at Elias? I bet they’d hire you if you’ve proven it.

I’m not really even down with stealing 3rd with one 1 out for same reason I don’t like stealing 3rd with zero out. The 27% increase is probably offset by the probability of getting caught,, particularly with 3rd which is a harder base to steal. Sure you can now score with a sacrifice fly, which is partially reflected in the 27 percent increase I imagine, but I just don’t think it’s worth of risk of getting caught. In the end, it’s probably a wash in terms of runs created. Thanks for posting that chart btw.

Holy cow, I just saw that Danica Patrick ran over some dude.

But, you haven’t read all of my posts if you think people should be bunting all the time. I have said that an offense like ours, that struggles to score runs would benefit from moving the man over, hitting the ball to the right side and trying to manufacture runs. I am not saying everytime someone gets on we should bunt. Sacrifice bunts are just one part of small ball.

If you are in the 4th inning, 1-1 game, lead off man gets on and you are facing a tough pitcher, then you should be bunting him over and letting the man behind you try to drive him in. You know the score will be close and every run matters.

If you are in the 1st inning, Roberts gets on, I am not saying but him over right away. In fact, he’d probably be better off trying to steal second. When he does, then have Mora focus on hitting the ball to the right side. That could lead to a hit that drives in Roberts or at least a ground ball to move him to third with one out.

This is the type of baseball the Orioles should be playing. Working on moving the runners up, situational hitting, and situational sacrificing. The reason I argue so much about against the originator of this post is because he is claiming that we should be swinging for the fences or going to the extra base hit to drive in our runs. The Orioles are not built for this, and no team is able to win with that kind of offense. Even the big time Red Sox are a solid OBP team that plays a lot of small ball to get their runners in. They focus on getting runners over into scoring position so their RBI men can drive them in. I was talking to a friend of mine about it today, and he said while he likes the home runs they hit, it is the guys getting on base and hitting the ball to the right side that puts them in a position to score as many runs as they do.

I like the data that was presented here, and I do not disagree with the data that was presented because you can’t disagree with facts. Unfortunately, the author of the article makes a conclusive decision about the bunting strategy when the results are not very definitive.

In those 12 seasons, there were 3152 games in which the game was tied in the top of the 3rd inning, and the visiting team had a runner on first with one out. The offensive team won 1490 of those games, or 47.27%. Similarly, there were 1880 games matching the post-bunt situation, of which 861 (45.80%) were won by the offensive team.

After he says this, he immediately determines that bunting is a losing strategy because the percentage, by his numbers, went down by 2%. I would argue that is maintaining the chance of winning because of the slim margin of change in percentage. His numbers here are flawed, but they are creative. This is similar to the chart the original author proposed. Given those 2 situations, he looked at the percentage of teams that won the game after that type of situation. It did not look at people who were in that situation, bunted, and won, so he made a conclusion about bunting that really had nothing to do with the actual sacrifice. He analyzed to given scenarios and just made a hypothetical conclusion. That is creative, but it is flawed.

He made a bunch of the charts, and concluded that because there was a lot of red that bunting did not help. However, a lot of those situations it makes no sense to bunt the guy over. If there is a 2-3 run differential with 1 runner on, no team is going to bunt. The exception is a pitcher for the NL, and they would bunt them to avoid a double play. Also, you would not sac bunt anyone with 1 out unless it was a tie game in the 9th. Then, you may take the chance of getting a 2 out hit to drive in the run. So, most of his charts don’t cover bunting situations.

The ending paragraph comes in as this:

However, there do appear to be game situations which suggest bunting as an appropriate strategy. Bunting is more effective when there are no outs than with one out. Likewise, bunting is more advantageous with two runners advancing than with just one. Neither of these conclusions is surprising.

Apart from counting outs and runners, bunting is most appropriate late in a close game. In particular, when the home team can advance the winning run with no outs, bunting is a good idea. Similarly, when the offensive team leads by one or two runs late in the game, bunting increases the chances of scoring an insurance run (and therefore increases chances of winning the game). Since bunting generally reduces the expected number of runs scored, it is only appropriate when a single run matters. Therefore bunting early - especially to advance a single runner - is seldom desirable.

With his closing paragraphs, he agreed with everything I just said. Yes, bunting in the first inning does not make sense, but swinging for the fence does not make sense either. If the lead off man gets on, Mora’s job is to get him into scoring position as a minimum. He should be swinging, but he should be trying to put the ball in a place that if an out is made, Brian is going to be on second. That is part of small ball: being smart with your at-bats.

This is the type of statistics that are a good argument against bunting as someone found a way to isolate many different situations to find out percent chance of winning. It is a unique way of looking at things, but too many things can affect a teams chance of winning to simply look at the situations of whether or not they won given a certain situation.

...for a detailed response right now, but pretending small ball is the answer to our deficient offense is the very definition of fantasy. Sure there’s exceptions, such as high percentage basestealers like I mentioned above – and an occasional element of surprise can behoove a team in a tight spot. But making small ball the game plan for a team is a recipe for doing little more than handing outs, for free, to the other side.

“If you play for one run, that’s all you’ll ever get.”

Words of wisdom. And no, I don’t think this is a team of mashers that’s going to hit an above average number of 3 run homers. But this is not the point. The point is you want a string of scoring plays in an inning and giving away outs with stupid pet trick strategies either curtails or eliminates the possibility of this ever happening.