The Bunt Conundrum

How much is enough?

The Bunt Conundrum

I spent some time watching this video of the April 26, 1986 Mets at Cardinals game the other day:

If you haven’t watched it yet, I recommend checking it out. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff here, including a surprisingly aggressive baserunning play by Ozzie Smith late in the game.

The part that stood out most to me, though, was the bottom of the 9th inning, when the Cardinals were desperately trying to come back.

St. Louis managed to get three straight hits to score two runs, turning a 4-1 deficit into a 4-3 game. They had a runner on first base with nobody out, and Tito Landrum coming up.

And… they bunted.

Now, this might have been intended to surprise the Mets. Landrum only had two successful regular season sacrifice bunts over the past 4 seasons. Tito was also coming off a well known performance in the 1985 World Series, where he collected 9 hits in 25 plate appearances, including a big home run in game 4.

If this situation came up for me in any sim, I’d swing away. I can’t think of any case in which I’d bunt with Tito.

Anyway, the bunt wound up counting as a base hit, as Tito beat it out. And, unfortunately, I’m not aware of any databases that keep statistics on the number of times players bunted successfully for base hits. It still looks like a line drive in the box score, even after we’ve carefully cataloged so many regular season games.

Catcher Mike Heath came up next with runners on first and second and still nobody out, and he also bunted. This makes a little more sense. Heath was hitting right around .100 coming into this game, after all.

Roger McDowell grabbed the bunt and threw to third just in time to get the lead runner, completely defeating the purpose of the bunt. Jesse Orosco then came in and got Terry Pendleton to ground into a game ending double play.

But would you bunt with Mike Heath as well? Would you look into using a pinch hitter instead?

It’s hard to say, since Baseball Reference and the other websites aren’t quite good enough to show us the complete rosters available to the managers for each game. However, I do see that Clint Hurdle was on the roster and, presumably, available for the game. Hurdle was a left handed hitter, and presumably would have fared better against the righthanded McDowell than the right handed hitting Heath. Perhaps that would have caused Davey Johnson to bring Jesse Orosco out one batter early — maybe Whitey Herzog was trying to avoid that?

There’s always a lot of second guessing you can do in these situations. However, the thing I wonder the most about after watching that game is whether we bunt frequently enough in our games.

I don’t think there’s a chance I’d bunt with Tito Landrum in that situation, and I probably wouldn’t have bunted with Mike Heath, either. McDowell had pitched poorly after relieving Sid Fernandez, and I probably would have taken my chances with grounding into a double play.

But is that the right way to manage? Or should we bunt more frequently to try to better emulate what happened in real life?

What do you think?