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.