Do I Bunt Enough?
Superbas at Reds, May 24, 1908 — And A Question Every Replayer Wonders About
Do I Bunt Enough?
I know I’m not the only baseball replay fanatic to ask themselves that key question.
Am I bunting enough? Should I bunt more frequently? How can I tell?
I’m not sure that I’ve got a great answer to the question. Sure, you can look at the raw numbers of sacrifice hits recorded for any given season. However, for really old seasons (like 1908), you won’t be able to distinguish the bunts from the sacrifice flies. They were all counted the same back in the olden days, after all.
It was the boxscore of this game that got me thinking along these lines:
There were 3 successful sacrifice hits in this contest. Brooklyn put down two: one by Phil Lewis, and another by Nap Rucker. The Reds had a single bunt by Admiral Schlei en route to their somewhat easy victory.
Now, in theory this should be correct, right? According to Baseball Reference, there were 1.33 successful sacrifice hits per team per game in the 1908 National League — which, of course, is the highest ratio in the entire history of the National League (and by a considerable margin):
It should be just fine to have one team bunt twice successfully and the other team bunt once successfully, right?
However, I still get this feeling that I could have done more.
For example, the Superbas, who are inept at scoring runs, had the leadoff man on first base in the top of the first inning. I could have bunted with Tommy Sheehan. I chose instead to swing away:
I’m guessing that I decided not to bunt in this situation because I’m so used to modern baseball strategy. It just feels wrong to bunt with the second man up in the game.
It’s also kind of hard to tell what happened in real life, since we still don’t have play by play accounts for all 1908 games. Perhaps we’ll have a better idea of the play by play sometime in the future. For now, though, all we can do is give it our best guess.
I probably should have also bunted in this situation in the top of the 5th, with the Superbas down 2-0:
The groundout by Harry Pattee was just as good as a bunt — but he was charged with a time at bat for it in the end.
I could go on, but I think you get the drift. What do you think? Should I bunt more frequently?
Daniel, again another good question.
I certainly have no definitive answer. I replayed the 1908 AL season on Diamond Mind using a homebrewed database.
In real life, there were 1686 sacrifice hits in the AL. In my replay there were 1942. Some of the sacrifice hits in both real life and the replay were what would be scored as sacrifice flies today.
Even so, it's likely that I may have bunted "too much." I tended to bunt almost everytime a runner reached first base with none out. I often bunted when a runner reached second base with none out. I occasionally attempted squeeze bunts and sometime had a pitcher bunt with a man on first and one out. The only occasional exceptions were when strong hitters like Ty Cobb and Sam Crawford batted.
Runs were at such a premium that strategy seemed logical, but I may have overdone it a bit.