The bunt, the go-to strategy for traditional managers and reliable friend to many weak-hitting pitchers, died this season in Major League Baseball. It was 122 (or thereabouts). The cause of death was logic.  For nearly two decades, baseball sabermetricians have banded together to decry bunting. They saw it as a rally-killing blunder in which a team willingly surrendered an out despite modest returns. Many in baseball appeared be listening as the number of bunting attempts dropped steadily. This year, the bunt has all but vanished.  Overall bunting is down throughout baseball from once every 109 plate appearances in 2004 to once every 179 this year. But that’s not the half of it. If you ignore pitchers altogether and look only at position players, batters are bunting once every 337 plate appearances this year versus once every 162.5 in 2004. That means that non-pitchers are bunting an average of about once every nine games, according to Stats, LLC.  It took baseball’s collective minds a long time to realize that men who are skilled at swinging bats should probably just swing bats. In 1927, Lou Gehrig was asked to bunt 21 times despite slugging 47 homers and knocking in 173 runs. To the delight of opposing pitchers, Babe Ruth sacrificed himself that many times in 1930 when he hammered 49 homers. The most bunts for a player with 20-plus homers this century is Derek Jeter’s 16 in 2004. But last year, Royals’ Mike Moustakas led baseball’s 20-plus-homer club with four sacrifices.  The Angels, with old-school manager Mike Scioscia at the helm, appear intent on keeping the dying art alive. Los Angeles began Monday tied for the MLB lead in sacrifice bunts with 11—remarkable considering none of them have been by a pitcher.  The bunt is only the most obvious casualty in a bigger movement. The rates of steals and intentional walks—two plays that are high on the sabermetrician’s enemies list—have also dramatically declined. If these trends continue, they will essentially turn managers into glorified caretakers, watching the games along with the rest of us.
The relentless cries of baseball sabermetricians have been heard as the number of bunts leaguewide plummets this season