Analytics Stories

CHAPTER 39Why Have Sacrifice Bunts and Intentional Walks Nearly Disappeared?

Michael Lewis's mega best seller Moneyball (Norton, 2003) inspired an Oscar-nominated movie and increased the use of analytics in sports and other areas. The application of analytics to baseball is often called sabermetrics (named after the Society for American Baseball Research). By 2017, every Major League Baseball Team (see https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-big-data-won-the-2017-world-series/) used analytics as a tool in decisions such as lineup selection, which free agents to sign, which players to draft, and when to pull the starting pitcher.

Great websites, including Baseball-reference.com, Fangraphs.com, and Baseballprospectus.com, have produced thousands of pages of great sabermetrics analysis. In this chapter, we provide simple explanations of how the increased use of analytics has greatly reduced two tools that used to be favorites of managers: the sacrifice bunt (often abbreviated SH for sacrifice hit) and the intentional walk (often abbreviated IBB for intentional base on balls).

Using information from Baseball-reference.com, we graphed in Figure 39.1 the decline in sacrifice hits and intentional walks. For reasons that will become clear later in the chapter, we also graphed the increase in home runs (HRs). From the figure, you can see that sacrifice hits (use the axis on the right) have dropped from 0.37 bunts per game (for each team) to a mere 0.17 bunts per game. In 2019, the ...