Should the Brewers Bunt More?

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Photo: Hunter Renfroe - Instagram

Hunter Renfroe

Hunter Renfroe

Hunter Renfroe has hit some baseballs a long way this season, but one of his most-discussed hits traveled about 70 feet.

Renfroe has a shot to hit 30 home runs in three consecutive full MLB seasons but trailing by a run and leading off the bottom of the eleventh inning against the Dodgers on Tuesday he squared to bunt against all-time great closer Craig Kimbrel. Kimbrel’s pitch was a 97-mph fastball above the strike zone, but Renfroe managed to put it in play and hit it softly enough that Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy had no play. Renfroe later came around to score the winning run in a walk-off victory.

Renfroe’s decision caught the Dodgers defense offguard and he was credited with a single, but the base hit was not his intent.

“I knew, looking forward to it, it was going to be tough for us to get multiple hits off of him (Kimbrel), and I knew Kolten behind me had a good chance of hitting a fly ball. I wasn’t bunting for a hit, I was just bunting to get him to third base,” Renfroe told reporters after the game. It was his second sacrifice attempt of the season, and until 2022 he hadn’t successfully laid down a sac bunt at any point in his six-year MLB career.

Cost Exceeds Benefit?

Sacrifice bunts were, for a long time, a punching bag of the sabermetric movement. While it made sense intuitively to “lay one down” and advance a runner, the research at the time showed that the value lost by giving up an out largely negated and often exceeded any benefit derived from the baserunners moving up.

That argument was not new, of course: Earl Weaver, who managed the Orioles from 1968-‘86, was famously quoted as saying “When you play for one run, that's usually all you get. I have nothing against the bunt in its place, but most of the time, that place is in the bottom of a long-forgotten closet.”

What Weaver didn’t have at that time, however, were the specific numbers to back up his assertion. The sabermetric movement provided that data and did so at an opportune time: In 2000 MLB’s scoring environment peaked at 5.14 runs per game, the highest it had been since 1936. At a time when runners were most likely to come around and score anyway, teams were nonetheless often willing to give up an out to advance them 90 feet. Position players (non-pitchers) attempted to sacrifice bunt 1278 times in 2000, about .53 times per game. One player, White Sox shortstop and former Brewer Jose Valentin, attempted 20 sac bunts that season. Entering play Sunday there were 21 teams that had attempted 20 or fewer sac bunts in 2022.

Sacrifice bunting has reached a low point in 2022, with teams attempting them just 504 times across the first 1806 games of this year (.28 attempts per game). Some teams have virtually abolished them: Entering play Sunday the Phillies, Marlins, Cardinals, Giants and Dodgers had been credited with five or fewer sac bunts on the season, and the Braves hadn’t done it a single time. Three teams have five or fewer attempts.

An unintended consequence of the sabermetric revolution, however, was that bunting became something of a lost art on the way to a point in history where it would occasionally be beneficial. In 2022 the MLB scoring environment is down to 4.31 runs per game, more than eight tenths of a run down from 2000. In an environment where it’s harder to string together hits or reach base, it’s easier to build an argument for the occasional decision to attempt to bunt a runner over. 

The decision, of course, varies team-by-team: The Dodgers almost never bunt (one successful sacrifice on the season), but also score 5.31 runs per game to lead all MLB teams. They’re scoring plenty without giving up outs. The Tigers (MLB-worst 3.18 runs per game) and Marlins (3.67, fourth worst), however, also rarely bunt and perhaps would be well-advised to occasionally utilize it.

Extra Innings

The bunting environment has also changed a bit in recent years as the format in extra innings has shifted. With extra innings now starting with the “zombie runner” or “Manfred man” on second base, teams now have a built-in strategic reason to move runners over. Entering play Sunday, however, teams had gone to extra innings in 316 contests and attempted a sacrifice bunt just 41 times from the tenth inning on (less than once every eighth game). The ability to bunt is also often cited as one option to beat increasingly prevalent infield shifts.

The easy explanation for the decline of bunting in sacrifice-friendly or shift situations is that hitters “don’t want to” or “weren’t taught to” lay down bunts anymore, and to a degree there’s probably some truth to that. Hitters who don’t regularly bunt are probably less likely to be comfortable doing so and less likely to have the skill necessary to do it successfully.

Modern pitching, however, adds another layer to that challenge. Increased specialization and advanced training methods mean that pitchers throw harder and have more movement on their pitches than ever before. The same trends that have made it increasingly difficult for batters to make contact on swings would seemingly also make it increasingly difficult to successfully bunt. Furthermore, the sport’s increase in pitch velocity would likely make it harder to “deaden” the ball on a bunt attempt, a key to success.

Increased difficulty aside, however, the changes in baseball’s run environment and rule structure would seem to make it reasonable to consider bunting more often, and moments like the one Hunter Renfroe had on Tuesday might make it more likely that others will try.