FanPost

Bunting Rates by Comparison


After some discussion about the bunting in last night's game, I thought it would be interesting to look at Hurdle's bunting tendencies and to see how they stack up against the rest of the league. All of these numbers are base on successful sacrifices, and disregard all other outcomes of a called bunt. S

First I looked at the most common base/out states to see what percentage of the time the Pirates bunted. Using 2011 stats (from Baseball Reference)

First for the Pirates,

bases outs PA SH %
1 0 335 43 12.84%
2 0 113 9 7.96%
12 0 74 5 6.76%
1 1 362 10 2.76%
2 1 191 2 1.05%
12 1 140 4 2.86%

And next for the NL

1 0 9985 748 7.49%
2 0 3398 269 7.92%
12 0 2373 243 10.24%
1 1 11732 218 1.86%
2 1 5838 9 0.15%
12 1 4532 84 1.85%

A couple of interesting things here. Looks like Hurdle loves the bunt in the most simplified position, 1 on no out, almost doubling the league average. Yet, he is much less likely to bunt with runners on first and second, no outs, for some reason. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, except that maybe there weren't many times that the situation arose and he was in the bottom half of the lineup. Also interesting is that the Pirates had 2 of the 9 NL bunts with a runner on 2nd and no outs.

The second thing I wanted to look at was bunts by inning.

First, for the NL

Inning PA SH %
1st 20856 100 0.48%
2nd 20229 179 0.88%
3rd 20693 255 1.23%
4th 20606 160 0.78%
5th 20649 215 1.04%
6th 20891 146 0.70%
7th 20715 179 0.86%
8th 20642 181 0.88%
9th 15822 139 0.88%
Extra 4142 113 2.73%

And for the Buccos

1st 688 5 0.73%
2nd 679 5 0.74%
3rd 658 12 1.82%
4th 683 8 1.17%
5th 673 9 1.34%
6th 686 6 0.87%
7th 664 11 1.66%
8th 680 5 0.74%
9th 523 8 1.53%
Extra 130 6 4.62%

Again, we see that in about every category, Clint is much above average. Interesting that we are considerably higher in the third, but lower in the second. I would guess this is a result of when the pitcher bats, but not totally sure. Also, in the 7th inning he is double the average rate. The extra inning rate could mean a ton of different things, and its a pretty small sample, not sure if we can read anything into that.

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