The Giants Love to Bunt. Or Do They?

Luis Gonzalez San Francisco Giants
Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

Coming into 2022, Mike Yastrzemski was something of a cipher. Was he a late bloomer who suddenly learned how to hit? From 2019 through the 2021 All Star break, he was excellent, to the tune of a .266/.350/.514 slash line, a 128 wRC+, and 48 homers in 932 plate appearances. Or was he old news, a flash in the pan that pitchers developed a counter for? In the second half last year, he hit .212/.281/.483, struck out nearly 30% of the time, and generally looked like the career minor leaguer he’d been before 2019.

This year, he’s been back on track, and it’s largely been due to a better on-base percentage. Some of that is striking out less; he’s turned in a career-low swinging-strike rate and career low strikeout rate to go along with it. Just as importantly, though, he’s doing better on balls in play, and doing so partially by bunting — something of a San Francisco specialty this year.

In the first 300 games of his career, Yastrzemski bunted ten times. That generally tracks; he’s not particularly fast and hits for power. Why would he do anything other than clock balls over the fence — or, in spacious Oracle Park, into triples alley and off the wall? In fact, you might think that 10 bunts was 10 too many, if it weren’t for the fact that he turned six of them into hits.

This year, he’s put that plan into overdrive, with three bunt hits already after a third of a season. He’s been part of a concerted San Francisco bunting effort so far this year. The team has gone after shifts that don’t respect bunting ability by targeting them early and often, and its captain, Brandon Belt, is something of a bunting enthusiast himself. In fact, the Giants lead baseball in bunt hits, with 11, despite having exactly zero of the 75 fastest runners in baseball this year, per Statcast’s sprint speed leaderboard.

I’ll be frank: that’s awesome! I love bunts. A successfully executed bunt for a hit is my favorite play in all of baseball, particularly if it’s well-defended and still becomes a hit. This is visual poetry:

If that were the end of it, I don’t think I’d write about the Giants’ bunting prowess. Or, well, maybe I still would, but that’s just because I’m always looking for a way to GIF a dejected third baseman putting the ball in his pocket. The Nationals, for example, have 10 bunt singles already this year, and I’m not writing about them as some new practitioners of an incredible strategy.

But trust me, there’s more. The Giants are the most prolific bunting team in baseball. They also succeed on their bunts at the highest rate in baseball:

Highest Team Bunt Success Rates
Team Bunt Hits Bunt Success%
Giants 11 64.7%
Marlins 3 60.0%
Phillies 9 56.3%
Rangers 7 50.0%
Brewers 4 50.0%
Dodgers 2 50.0%
Cubs 4 44.4%
Mets 8 38.1%
Tigers 5 35.7%
A’s 7 35.0%

That’s bunt hits divided by total bunts in play, and now that the DH has filtered those pesky pitcher sacrifices from the data, it’s a good measure of how good a team is at turning bunts into baserunners. That’s not to say there are no intentional sacrifice bunts anymore, but without pitchers to mess up the numbers, many sacrifice bunts are just clever two-way plays by hitters; if you bunt with a runner on base, you can either advance them with a sacrifice or reach yourself. Here’s Yastrzemski doing exactly that against Atlanta last year; he was credited with a sacrifice on the play, and that outcome wasn’t bad for the Giants or anything, but he was certainly hoping to reach base:

The Giants don’t have a single sacrifice bunt this year. They’re just too danged efficient at turning them into base hits. They’ve done it in every way imaginable. There’s the classic “nice shift, jerkface” bunt:

There’s the sneak attack bunt against a third baseman playing back:

There’s a personal favorite of mine, the “he couldn’t have rolled it any better” bunt, a subset of the shift-beating bunts with added difficulty:

And of course, the best bunt of all: the heat check bunt. Here’s Belt bunting, rather poorly, with two outs:

Was that a good spot to bunt? Perhaps. Was it a good bunt? No, it most certainly was not. But it still put a run on the board, because even major leaguers make errors from time to time, particularly when you force them to make tough plays at high speed. That wasn’t a gimme out, even after Belt put more air on the bunt than he wanted to. The Giants do a good job of targeting opponents, finding situations where a less-than-perfect bunt can still put the defense to the test, and then just let the chips fall where they may.

While this is all true, it’s still only 11 hits. That’s not very many hits! The Giants have 438 total hits this year and another 198 walks. I don’t care how you do the math; these bunts aren’t the difference between a great offense and a lackluster one.

Except maybe they’re more important than we think. Being so willing to bunt — so willing that you’ll bunt while up nine runs, or with your sluggers, or with two outs, or whatever arbitrary “they bunted there?” qualifiers you want to put on it — means that your opponent has to think about it, and adjust their strategy to account for it.

Want to station your third baseman in the general vicinity of second base in a giant overshift? Feel free, but they might be charging toward third base to attempt a tough running throw soon. Want to play back and guard the lines with a one-run lead? You might just be gifting the offense a baserunner, which would make that lead feel mighty flimsy.

Gabe Kapler knows this. He’s talked about it this season. These bunts aren’t sneaking under the radar; the manager is letting everyone know they do it, practically daring other teams to take the bunt away. And teams have noticed; in the last month, opposing third basemen are starting eight feet closer to home plate, on average, than they did against San Francisco in 2021. That’s true against righties, but it’s even more true against lefties; teams that run lefty shifts against them have largely done so with a pinched-in third baseman.

But maybe it’s just a game within a game, because the Giants have responded by discarding the bunt. If you split the season into two halves, the Giants were hyper-aggressive with bunts in the first half — they bunted 13 times and succeeded on 10 of those. No one else was close to matching their combination of efficiency and volume; the Mets were second with six bunt hits, and they succeeded less than half the time.

Since then, the Giants have only bunted four times, a bottom-half rate in the league. Seven teams have double digit bunts in play over that time frame. That’s not to say the Giants never show bunt; I’m only looking at bunts that end plate appearances, so early bluffs or fouled off attempts don’t show up. Still, I think there’s design here: the Giants bunted a ton, and told everyone how much they were bunting, then moved on as teams scrambled to adapt to yesterday’s news.

If they keep eschewing the bunt, opposing defenses might be tempted to return to their shifting and backing-up ways. After all, the Giants are a good team to shift against. They have a ton of lefties, and those lefties hit the ball on the ground frequently; for the year, they’re seventh in baseball when it comes to total grounders hit by left-handers. They hit those balls hard; they’re seventh in exit velocity on lefty grounders. They also pull those grounders at a slightly above average rate. In other words, the optimal defense, ignoring bunts, would be an overshift with infielders playing back. If you’re guarding against the bunt, however, that’s not an option.

So teams will weigh the pros and cons of continuing to guard the barn door when the horses have already bunted for a hit and fled. Eventually, they’ll probably back off; it’s incredibly tempting to tilt your defense, particularly when the bunts you’re contorting your alignment for never show up.

When the defenses back off, though, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Giants will be waiting to pounce. These bunts, after all, are important. They worked on them in the spring. They’re keeping opposing teams off balance, confused about what’s coming next. They’re making it just a little bit harder to defend balls in play, one of many little edges the Giants try to capture every day.

One final non-Giants note: I’ve mostly talked about bunt hits rather than bunt singles in this article. That’s for exactly one reason: I wanted to show you something at the end of the article as a treat for letting me ramble about bunts for 1,500 words. Feast your eyes on the bunt of the season, a Yoán Moncada bunt double:





Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Twitter @_Ben_Clemens.

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raregokusmember
1 year ago

Excellent stuff as always Ben!