Finding the Best Bunters in Baseball

In Tuesday’s missive on league-wide bunt tendencies, I ran out of time and space before I could single out some of this season’s standout individual bunters for special attention. As in every collection of ballplayers, there are a few outliers who skew the sample. To continue the metaphor that a bunt is baseball’s mid-range jump shot, these are your LaMarcus Aldridges.

The buntiest hitter in baseball, which you probably could have guessed, is Reds outfielder TJ Friedl. He has put 28 bunts in play this season (nobody else has more than 18) and has struck out attempting to bunt three more times (also tops in the league; there have only been 19 bunt attempt strikeouts total this year, according to Baseball Savant).

tj friedl is a bunt single merchant pic.twitter.com/10QvlOXzdL

— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) August 18, 2023

You can see in this compilation why Friedl bunts so much. He’s a small left-handed hitter who, despite having 12 home runs on the year, doesn’t usually hit the ball hard. He’s also a plus runner who has graded out as one of the best runners in the league this season, and even at the plate, he’s searching for every advantage. The archetypal lefty jailbreak bunt action is at work here, as Friedl lops the ball all over the infield in the hope he can beat it down the line.

But while Friedl is a great volume bunter, he’s not necessarily the most efficient bunter in the league. His 14 bunt singles lead the league, but his batting average on bunts, .700, is just 16th among players with at least five bunts in play. (Through Monday’s action, 72 individual players had reached that milestone. Joey Bart has singled twice in two bunt attempts but does not have the volume to be worth discussing here; my “The Bart is a Lonely Bunter” headline idea sadly goes to waste.) And though Friedl is 8-for-8 on sacrifice bunt attempts and has even reached base once while being credited with a sacrifice hit, his success rate (hits and sacrifice hits divided by bunt attempts) of 71% is just 33rd out of 72. We can do better.

In January, Ben Clemens wrote about the bunt single as an unsung pillar of Daulton Varsho’s offensive game. And sure enough, Varsho is the only hitter, other than Friedl, with double-digit bunt hits this season. While Friedl has made 31 bunt attempts and reached base only 14 times, Varsho is 10-for-15 on bunt hit attempts and was successful on his only sacrifice.

Friedl embodies one of the two archetypes of great bunters. The first is the little guy who can scoot and bunts to get on base; generally speaking, this is a fast group of players.

About three-quarters of the most frequent bunters in the league have above-average home-to-first times. Almost half of the heavy bunters are in the top quartile of fastest runners, and one out of every eight bunt fanatics is in the top 5% of leaguewide speed. But there are a few laggards.

That brings us to the second archetype: the… hmm, give me a minute to come up with a polite euphemism… defensively focused catcher who doesn’t run well but can get down a sacrifice bunt. If you’re going to make an out, it might as well be a productive one.

Five players out of the 72 have a perfect record on bunting this season; every time they’ve dropped one down, they’ve either reached base themselves or advanced the runner. These players are Luke Raley, Brendan Donovan, Adam Frazier, Kevin Smith, and Jose Herrera, and all of them have exactly five bunts on the season. Herrera, though, has 11th-percentile sprint speed. Martín Maldonado (11 for 14 on sacrifice bunts, zero hits) has a home-to-first time of 4.51 seconds. If he raced Corbin Carroll down the line, Carroll would beat him by nearly three-quarters of a second. Austin Hedges (10 sacrifice bunts on 11 attempts, fifth-percentile sprint speed) is one of the best sacrifice bunters around but has yet to beat out a bunt single this season.

What if there were a synthesis of these two types? The speedy, pesky left-handed contact hitter and the light-hitting catcher looking for any way to contribute? (Varsho, who was a catcher until very recently, no longer qualifies.) Meet Garrett Stubbs: 10 bunt attempts, one sacrifice, seven singles, two RBI.

Garrett Stubbs currently leads the National League in bunt base hits (4) pic.twitter.com/Y7y1Dp64xH

— Phillies Muse (@Phillies_Muse) June 12, 2023

At all of 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds, Stubbs is hardly an imposing physical presence. But despite being a catcher, he’s an above-average-to-plus runner who gets down the line a fraction faster than Steven Kwan and Cedric Mullins.

Friedl has a bit of a shotgun quality to his bunt style; he’s often moving before he makes contact with the ball, and as long as the ball lands in fair territory, he’s got a good shot at beating the throw. Stubbs also breaks out of the box quickly, but his bunts tend to be more precise; he squares the ball up and places it before he scrambles down the first base line. And he does it a ton.

With Rojas and Stubbs in the top four of this list, it’s worth noting that the highest bunt-to-total batted ball ratio of the Statcast era belongs to Roman Quinn, who tickled 19% in 2019. The Phillies seem to love a guy who can bunt.

Friedl is an everyday starter for the Reds. Stubbs is the backup to J.T. Realmuto, who has caught almost 10% more innings at catcher than anyone else over the past five years. Instead of his name, Stubbs has “Day Games” stitched onto his mitt, because that’s the only time he plays. Ten bunts might not seem like that many compared to Friedl or Varsho, but it’s a huge number for a hitter who has only put 68 balls in play all year.

Stubbs’ 7-for-9 on bunt hit attempts is the second-best batting average, behind Blake Sabol, among players with five or more bunt hits this year. It also makes up a huge portion of his overall offensive production:

I feel confident declaring Stubbs the best bunter in baseball — partially because this skill is so important to his all-around game, but mostly because nobody gets more bang for his bunt.