Long Live The Bunt

Good evening. There is no Academy of Bunting Sciences and there never has been.

AND YET

That tweet embed is awfully big but looky looky, the Reds hired a bunting consultant. Massively important and underrated baseball scholar Dan Szymborski ( HE’S THE GUY WHO INVENTED ZiPS, YEAH!) then ran the numbers. If you can click through, excellent. If not, here is the data from 2023 without the shift. He stated that this dataset comes to more or less the same conclusion: Bunts are cool, dudes.

Look at those juicy BABIPs. I want to crawl right into that spreadsheet like Number Muncher and start scarfing them down.

This is not meant to be any sort of dunk, dart, javelin, whatever. It is exciting to see that the most rational of all pursuits — the humble bunt — returning to the modern game of baseball.

We’re, like, excited and stuff. That’s all. I never did get around to coding the thing that was supposed to tweet the stuff but that’s because I realized I do not have the patience to code and debug. You’ve seen my writing, maybe even read it. I barely have the patience to properly finish a sentence half the time.

Some of these articles even just——