The Biggest Bunts of the 2010s

Earlier in this interminable offseason, I set out to find the best bunters of 2019. Why? Partially it’s because with no major league games, digging through old ones is an acceptable substitute. Partially it’s because it highlights some interesting and undervalued skills. And partially it’s because I love a good bunt for a hit.

There was one disappointing problem with the 2019 bunts, however: none of them were that momentous. The best bunt of 2019 was worth .326 WPA; in other words, the batting team’s odds of winning the game went up by 32.6 percentage points. That’s a big play, but it’s only the 12th-most valuable bunt in the last 10 years.

How does a bunt improve one team’s odds of winning by 32.6%? Like this:

So yes, a bunt needs some help from the opposing team to be worth so much. There’s no way around that; a bunt gets the defense involved in the play, so the best ones are going to involve a combination of good bunting and bad fielding. The most valuable bunts swing entire games — in this game, both runners scored and the Phillies won 6-5. Again, that’s not even one of the top 10 biggest bunts.

How can a bunt swing a team’s odds by more than that? I’m glad you asked, because today is all about show and tell. I’m not going to attempt to convince you that laying down one of these bunts is some kind of repeatable skill — it’s not. There’s some skill, but it’s mainly a case of good fortune. Instead, let’s just watch a bunch of wildly valuable bunts.

The biggest win probability swing of the last 10 years features some legends on their last legs. In 2011, Kerry Wood took the mound in the bottom of the eighth to protect a two-run lead. After a Scott Rolen double and an infield single, Ryan Hanigan stepped to the plate:

Oof. It’s hard to imagine a worse outcome — both runners scored and the go-ahead run ended up on third base. Wood’s throw wasn’t great, Aramis Ramirez’s stab was worse, and what in the world is this outfield route?

That’s the kind of cosmic mix-up you need to produce a bunt worth a monumental 47.5% of a win. That’s the high end — every other bunt here was worth less than that. Not necessarily much less, though: this next one was worth 46.4% of a win, barely lower. As an added bonus, it wasn’t even a sacrifice attempt:

Win probability models can’t capture the predicament that Nats were in. Oliver Pérez is hardly an average batter; he’s a career .163/.194/.169 hitter, and this was one of only three plate appearances he’s made since 2010. Simply put, he’s basically an out. Only, not this time. This time, he laid down an excellent bunt, in a non-bunt situation, and tied the game. As an added bonus, he was the last man standing on the Nats, so he pitched the next inning and got a win for his troubles.

By now, you probably have a picture in your head of how a bunt can be valuable. It has to be close and late. A runner needs to score, or at least end up in scoring position. The bunter needs to end up in scoring position as well. That’s exactly the case on our next stop:

What would a jaunt through the 2010’s be without a Fernando Rodney sighting? And what in the world was Carlos Pena doing here?

At this point, you understand the basic beats of a wildly valuable bunt. An okay bunt, a defensive miscue, and pretty soon things get out of hand. Let’s switch things up by finding a bunt that was scored as a single, rather than a sacrifice plus a comical string of errors. Naturally, it’s a bunt single from a catcher:

Did he get some help from a late defensive rotation? Indubitably. But that was still a pretty nice little bunt, deadened perfectly to avoid the charging infielders. Add in a little umpire back-pick and a little Juan Lagares, and that’s a run-scoring hit that traveled 10 feet:

Okay, that wasn’t a real bunt single. That was an excellent bunt that got a little help from circumstances that fall outside the normal definition of an error, and was thus scored a single. We can do better. In fact, there’s a bunt with no errors at all in the top 10:

There’s almost nothing to say. That was simply perfect. Two outs, tie game; Bryan Holaday dreamed about lining a single to center in this exact situation when he was a kid. Then he got a chance to do it in real life — and he bunted. This isn’t some throwback to an earlier era of baseball, either. The previous batter was Nick Castellanos, and he struck out swinging away — you know, the thing that regular batters do in this situation!

This wasn’t some pre-meditated plan. He swung away on the first two pitches of the at-bat. But when you look up and see this:

Well, they’re pretty much asking you to bunt, aren’t they? Even as a catcher, Holaday thought he could beat out a good bunt, and it certainly didn’t hurt that his career on-base percentage was .287. At that point, why not take a chance?

This has been a quick tour of the most valuable bunts. But that’s the most valuable bunts for the batting team. That’s the way I think about it, but what the heck, let’s throw in a few that worked out well for the fielders before we’re done. Most of them are exactly what you’d expect, double plays in key situations:

Well, yeah. Those two runners aboard, with no one out, represented a decent chance of winning the game outright. It was, in fact, one of the rare places where a straight sacrifice bunt makes good WPA sense. Uh… the defense knew that.

Before we leave, let’s throw in one last spectacularly bad result of a bunt. You think you know how a bunt double play looks. It looks exactly like the above play — a slow runner at the plate, a ball that bounces directly to a defender, a bang-bang play at first, and maybe some awful camouflage uniforms. Or, alternately, this:

Yeah, uh, that’s a pretty bad beat. Was Daniel Robertson in the wrong to be off the base there? Not really! It’s a bunt; what is he supposed to do, stand on third? Gómez’s bunt isn’t perfect, obviously. In fact, it’s pretty bad. But if J.T. Realmuto squeezed down the foul line more closely, or if he was a beat late adjusting to the ball, it lands — for a mediocre result, sure, but not a disastrous one.

So that’s how you create a terrible bunt. Aim it wrong, be slow, get unlucky; heck, stack a few of them. It’s the best bunts, only in reverse: the play starts simply, but a few cascading errors, by one side or the other, turn it into a game-changer.

Is any of this predictive? Of course not! Kerry Wood wasn’t particularly susceptible to bunts turning into two-RBI triples. Bryan Holaday isn’t the batter you most want at the plate with a man on third; he’s a no-bat backup catcher who was in the right place at the right time.

Not every article needs to be predictive, needs to explain the secret code of baseball that’s woven into the fabric of the game. It’s June 3, there’s no baseball, and I wanted to see some bunts that made me laugh. Can’t that be good enough?