Jose Herrera Is Bunting Like It’s Going Out of Style (Which It Did, 100 Years Ago)

On Friday, Ben Clemens laid out five fun things to watch during the second half of the 2025 season. The one that caught my eye was the race to lead the league in bunts for base hits. The contestants all make plenty of sense. The group of Kyle Isbel, Jacob Young, TJ Friedl, Victor Scott II, and Xavier Edwards includes four light-hitting, fleet-footed center fielders and one light-hitting, fleet-footed shortstop. But there’s another bunting race going on, and in it, these four speedsters – along with everyone else in baseball – are getting dusted by Jose Herrera, the Diamondbacks backup catcher whom Statcast rates as the 491st fastest out of 510 qualified players this season. It’s the race to lead the league in sacrifice bunts, and no one in baseball is quite so eager to choose the greater good over their own personal gratification than Herrera.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Herrera is tied for fourth in attempted sac bunts. He just leads the league because he’s batting a thousand on his attempts. (Not literally, of course; a successful sac bunt doesn’t count toward your batting average at all.) The other players I’ve mentioned have failed, fouled, or whiffed on their bunts a lot, but not Herrera. We’re going to put Herrera’s proclivity for the sacrifice into context a little later, but let’s start with the obvious question. Why does Herrera bunt so much? It can’t just be because he’s good at it. It’s certainly not because he thinks he can beat out a hit with his third-percentile sprint speed. Often enough, he’s not even pretending to run hard. On this play, it’s not so much that he’s sacrificing himself as it is that he’s just kind of surrendering.

Fun fact: The runner didn’t score after this bunt, but the next time Herrera came up, he also had runners on base. Unfortunately, he wasn’t allowed to bunt, because there were two outs and the runners were on second and third. So he did the closest thing he could to bunting, checking his swing but catching the ball anyway and sending a weak two-run double down the third base line.

Herrera isn’t bunting so much because he happens to come up in a bunting situation all that often. So far this season, he’s had runners on with fewer than two outs in 23% of his plate appearances. Among players with at least 50 plate appearances, that puts him in just the 22nd percentile. For the most part, he’s bunting because he’s not offering much else in the way of offensive production. Herrera is running a 64 wRC+ and batting .195. He represents the somewhat rare case of a batter for whom the math really does say bunting is a good idea. Or, at least he should represent that. According to Statcast’s leveraged run values, which look at the game situation and show the change in run expectancy after every pitch, the league’s sacrifice bunts have an average value of -1.5 runs per 100 pitches this season. Herrera is at -0.7, but on the last pitch of each of his plate appearances this season, not just on sac bunts, he’s all the way down at -3.2. He’s arguably been way worse than the average sacrifice bunt, so why not just take the sacrifice, right? Here’s where things get weird.

If you don’t include Herrera’s bunts in his run expectancy total, it goes up to -1.6. That’s weird because it means that his bunts have been particularly unvaluable (which, it turns out, is a word). The average sac bunt is worth -1.5 runs per 100, but Herrera’s have been worth -5.5. What is happening here? How are they so staggeringly costly, especially when you consider that two of his bunts that were credited as successful sacrifices resulted in errors that scored runs?

It’s largely because not all sacrifices are created equal. Herrera is bunting in situations where the inning is rife with possibility. His sacrifice chokes out some of that possibility. All 10 of his bunts have come with no outs, and half of them have come with a runner already on second base. Those are situations where you’d much rather roll the dice, even on a player with a .301 on-base percentage, than just surrender an out.

Sorry, those last couple paragraphs got away from me. I don’t mean to complain. Yes, the Diamondbacks should stamp this nonsense out because the numbers say they’d be better off letting Herrera do his approximation of hitting. But I hope they don’t, because I am enjoying the Jose Herrera bunting experience, as we all should. It’s truly improbable, but it’s even more remarkable when we put it into context. To do that, we need to start by keeping in mind how infrequently Herrera has actually come to the plate this season. He was backing up Gabriel Moreno, and then when Moreno went down with a fractured right index finger, the Diamondbacks quickly brought in James McCann to replace him. Thanks to a 65 wRC+, which is actually an improvement on the 52 he carried into the season, Herrera has batted ninth in all but two of his starts. Before Moreno went down, he got pinch-hit for in more than a third of his starts. In all, he has just 166 plate appearances, while Isbel and Young are both over 230.

If you’re keeping score at home, that means that Herrera has laid down a sac bunt in 6% of his plate appearances. I calculated the sac bunt percentage of every batter with at least 150 plate appearances. Not only is that the highest rate this season, it’s only the second time someone has been above 6% this century. Catcher Bobby Wilson bunted 13 times in 201 PAs for the Angels in 2012. And that’s it. For the century. Herrera’s 6% rate ranks 169 in AL/NL history, or at least as far back as our records include sacrifice bunts. But keep in mind that he’s doing this in an era when the sac bunt is more or less dead. Of the 168 player-seasons ahead of him, 156 took place before 1930. Just 26 of them happened less than 100 years ago. Only two players have sacrificed themselves as frequently as Herrera in the last 50 years.

The names ahead of his on that list tell you that Herrera is keeping some very old company indeed. He’s there alongside Kid Gleason, Wee Willie Keeler, and multiple members of the 1919 Black Sox. In an era where a high-speed camera array can tell you the location, velocity, and attack angle of the bat head at the moment of impact, Herrera’s name is on the same list as Lena Blackburne, who lived in a time when you could make a name for yourself by inventing mud.

I write all the time about records that are in danger of being broken. Records are falling all the time because the game is always changing, so in one spot or another, we’re always breaking new ground. These days that means writing about the three true outcomes or hit-by-pitches. But Herrera is breaking old, old ground. He’s bunting like someone who just woke up from a 100-year nap, and I hope he doesn’t stop.