A Study of Strategy in Baseball and in Life by Stephen Taylor

More Works By The Same Author My Visit to Lotteryville The Champs-Chumps Ratio Available on Scribd www.scibd.com/malchatsmedia

A Study of Strategy in Baseball and in Life by Stephen Taylor

Walnut Creek, California

 2012 Stephen Taylor All Rights Reserved

A Malchats Media Publication For more information email: malchats@yahoo.com First Malchats Media edition, February 2012 Cover photo illustration, additional artwork, and page layouts designed by the author.

aseball is famousor perhaps notoriousfor being more than just a game to its most ardent fans. Those with a literary bent wax rhapsodic about the games philosophical implications: its seasonal arc; its dual nature as both individual and team sport; its larger meaning for society and the nation as a whole. Baseball, these commentators assure us, offers life lessons. And theyre rightthere are life lessons to be learned from baseball. Consider, for example, the lowly bunt. The sacrifice hitas the bunt is sometimes called went out of style back in the late 90s. Chicks dig the long ball was the rallying cry for the times, and against such a forceful argument anything as lowly and timid as a bunt didnt stand a chance. Sabermetricians threw reams of statistical analysis into the faces of traditionalists, a numerical onslaught that proved beyond a doubt that laying down a buntgiving up an out to move a runner over to the next basewas strategic folly. My local outfit, the Oakland Athletics, seized upon this notion with special zeal, and their success during the early years of this century helped solidify the new wisdom as fact in many minds. But a lot has changed these last few years, changes

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps that call into question the new received truth. With an intense spotlight now shining on steroid users, fewer bulked up sluggers are smashing the ball into the upper deck. Pitchers stand resurgent, dealing dominating games to an extent not seen since the days of Drysdale and Gibson. And economic uncertainties have helped bring down the old soaring expectations; most teams cant afford the few true sluggers left in the game today. But the object of the game remains the same: score more runs than your opponent and win. And if you cant repeatedly smash the ball over the fence, maybe a different approach can work equally welllike our aforementioned friend, the bunt. Strategically, the bunt is a simple weapon. The classic scenario calls for the bunt late in a close game: a team gets its leadoff hitter on base, then a sacrifice by the next batter moves the baserunner into scoring position, leaving two chances to get a base hit and bring the man on base home with that all-important run. The bunt is not a gambit designed to lead to abundant scoring; it is intended to help a team get one run at a time. And that is why the bunt has been the object of so much recent scorn. Teams need to score a lot of runs to win, according to the current wisdom; crooked numbers on the scoreboard win the game. One run at a time wont win anything. I beg to differ. One run at a time can, in fact, win you a lot of games. And in recognizing that simple fact, we can learn a valuable lesson about life and the virtue of small steps.

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps Consider the scenario presented above: the leadoff hitter gets on base, the next batter bunts him over, one of the next two batters gets the hit that brings the runner home. Its a simple strategy, one that a good team should be able to execute when necessary. As noted above, this bunt scenario usually takes place late in a tight game, when one run will tie the game or take the lead. But what if the bunt scenario were used in every inning? Think about it: how would a team do if the players tried, every inning at bat, to execute the sequence above? Lets imagine a hypothetical team that did just that: every time at bat, the team followed the steps outlined above to bring home one run per inning. How would such a team make out over the course of the full 162-game season? Very well, in fact. If that hypothetical team were successful with this strategy every inning of every game they played, they would average 8.5 runs per game. Thats right, 8.5 runs per gamenot 9. Remember, half a team's games are at played at home, and if the home side is winning after eight and a half innings, they dont bat in the bottom of the ninth. And, as you will see, there is very good reason to believe that our hypothetical bunt-happy team would reach the ninth inning well out in front. So then, does 8.5 runs per game sound like a lot to you? It should. That figure would set the record for runs per game. The highest scoring team in major league history, the 1930 New York Yankees, plated 6.9 runs per

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps game. Our hypothetical team easily beats that record without ever hitting one home run.1 Of course, our teams 8.5 runs per game are only hypotheticaland quite unrealistic. No team gets its leadoff hitter on base every inning; that in itself would be an extraordinary achievement. So lets rein in our speculation: suppose our hypothetical team of buntcrazy boys was only successful half the time. Success with the bunt scenario in half a teams at bats would yield an average of 4.5 runs per game. (This assumes a full nine innings of at bats each game, unlike the high-scoring scenario proposed above.) How does 4.5 runs per game stack up compared with other teams throughout baseball history? Not bad, as it turns out. Eleven teams in MLB history averaged exactly 4.5 runs per gamenone of them teams of particular distinction. But 4.5 runs per game puts a team well above the median scoring average for all major league teams over all seasons. Score 4.5 runs a game, and youre in the top half of all teams in baseball history. Plus, some of the teams that scored less than 4.5 runs per game are teams of distinction. In fact, twentynine teams scored less than 4.5 runs per game and won the World Series. Most of those teams played during the dead ball era (pre-1920s) or during the pitchingdominant seasons of the late 1960s-early 1970s, but a few of those champions are of more recent vintage,
1. All historical stats quoted herein cover baseballs modern era, starting with the ALs first season in 1901.

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps including the champs from 81, 82 and 85 (Dodgers, Cardinals, and Royals), and three straight champs from 88-90 (Dodgers, As, and Reds). (Apparently, there was a mini-dead ball era in the 1980s.)2 And the roster of low-scoring champs includes still more recent teams: the 1995 Atlanta Braves andperhaps most intriguing for this studythe 2010 San Francisco Giants, who won it all despite averaging a relatively anemic 4.3 runs per game. (The most recent champs, last year's St. Louis Cardinals, led the NL in scoring at a cool 4.7 runs per game.) Of course, the Giants victory came through a healthy dose of luckjust as do all championships. Such a flukey result suggests something interesting, but proves nothing, about the current state of the game. It simply shows that, even today, you can achieve great things in baseball without a high-scoring offense. But what about the bunt and its effectiveness? Does the strategy offered aboveplay the bunt scenario each inning, score your 4.5 runs a game, and see where it gets youmake any sense? To find out, lets examine a sample of real games from the 2011 season and see how our hypothetical bunt-happy team would fare. For this study, well focus on games played during the first full week of Julyfrom Monday, July 4th through Sunday, July 10thas our survey sample, for
2. Ironically, those three straight championship teams from 88-90 included the now notorious Bash Brother Oakland As. Despite their reputation as heavy hittersand steroid abusersthe Athletics actually won with pitching and defense.

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps a couple of reasons. First, those games fell immediately after the end of interleague play; all teams were playing normal games against regular rivals, lessening the likelihood of unusual outcomes based on unfamiliar opponents. Also, the first week of July sits almost exactly at the seasons midpoint, boosting the chances of seeing optimal in-season performanceno Spring Training hangover (the pitchers are ahead of the hitters, or vice versa); fewer games affected by bad weather; and no September call-ups skewing the results. In sum, these mid-season games promised to be as standard as possible, offering results without any expected bias. Having selected our sample games, we need to compare the actual winning run totals against our hypothetical, bunt-all-the-time teams expected performance. How many games would be won with the expected total of 4.5 runs a game? How many times would our team be outscored due to its safe, play-forone-run strategy? In the real world of Major League Baseball, would our hypothetical team stand a chance? The first complication arises from the anomaly of statistical averaging. Quite simply, a team cant score a half a run a game. That stat4.5 runs per game represents some games with 4 runs scored, some with 5 runs scored. To get around this quirk, we must compare all the games against two standards: a pessimistic approach, assuming our team successfully executes its bunt strategy just four times a game; and a more optimistic assessment, wherein our sacrificing team

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps brought five runs across the plate. This should cover all our bases (pun intended). Given those parameters, I studied the results of our sample games. To begin, I noted every team that scored exactly four runs in a game and logged their won-loss record. Next I ran through the same procedure for the teams that scored five runs in a game. I also logged the results for teams that scored six or more runs in each game, to see how our slap-hitting teams theoretical performance would stand up to the results for the heavier hitters. Table 1 below summarizes this data: Table 1 Record per runs scored, July 410, 2011
Runs Scored 4 5 6+ No. of Teams 29 28 57 Wins 14 23 45 Losses 15 5 12 Pct. .483 .821 .789

The twenty-nine teams that scored four runs in a game posted an underwhelming record14-15, one game under .500. That result suggests that our hypothetical team, succeeding only four out of nine innings, would be the very definition of mediocrity. But look at what happens when teams added one more run to their tally, matching the optimistic assessment for our bunt-happy team: a gaudy .821 winning percentage. That figure actually beats the record for teams that scored six or more runs a game. These numbers, though suggestive, must be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, the sample size is

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps quite small, a mere 103 games. Nor is any distinction made for when the targeted teams played each other; sometimes, the teams that scored five runs beat the four run teams. (This also may explain the slightly worse record for the high-scoring teams; many of those games were not routs but slugfests in which both teams scored a lot.) Also, our parameters artificially limit the sample to games in which teams scored exactly the prescribed number of runsresults that do not cover all the games played during the sample week. What about all those games that ended 2-1, 3-2, or 3-1? What about the lowscoring shutouts? How would our bunting team have fared in those games? To answer these questions, we must look at all the games played in the trial period and figure out the expected results for a team that scored four or five runs in each game. In other words, how many games would have been won with 4 runs scored, or with 5 runs? Table 2 summarizes those results: Table 2: Expected results, July 410, 2011
Total 4 Run 5 Run Games Wins* Losses Win % Wins** Losses Win % 103 71 32 0.689 84 19 0.816
*Games in which the losing team scored 3 runs or less ** Games in which the losing team scored 4 runs or less

In the 103 games played during the survey period, 84 games would have been won by a team scoring five runs. Thats an 84-19 record, for a phenomenal .816 percentagevery much in line with the actual results for teams that scored five runs a game in the survey

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps period. Our bunt early and often squad, achieving the optimistic scenarioscoring with the bunt strategy five times a gamewould be on a road to unparalleled success. But note too the record for the pessimistic scenario: 71-32, a lower but still very impressive .689 winning percentage. Extrapolate a .689 winning percentage over a full 162 game season and you get 111 wins. Only twelve teams in baseballs modern era have ever matched or exceeded a .689 winning percentage.3 The bunt scenario, artfully applied to secure four runs each and every game, could place your team among the greatest teams in baseball history. Let that sink in: among the greatest teams ever. Get your leadoff batter on, bunt him over, drive him home, four times a game. Thats all it would take: playing for one run each inning, and succeeding less than half the time, can make your team world-beaters. Note that this scenario assumes the strategys bare bones; the hit that drives the runner home does not need to be an extra base hit. A simple single to the outfield will suffice in most cases. No doubles, triples or home runs are needed. Not even a stolen base is required. Nor does this strategy actually hold back our hypothetical teams offense. The four run target is not
3. Amazingly, only six of those twelve teams won the World Series, though one of them, the 1902 Pittsburgh Pirates, played before the modern Series existed. Only two of the twelve did not finish in first placebeaten out, obviously, by another two members of the same group of teams.

Bunts, Baseball, and the Virtue of Small Steps an upper limitjust a bottom line goal. Imagine how potent our team will be if they put four runs on the scoreboard early and can swing away for the rest of the game, in every game of the seasona season that will, by our calculations, end with a playoff berth at the very least, quite possibly a pennant, and maybe even a World Series victory. Just as it is with raindropswhere one drop has almost no impact, but billions of them can carve the Grand Canyonso too with bunts and base hits. And there we find our life lesson, writ large in horsehide and 108 double stitches: through small steps, out of humble efforts, great success can be achieved. You dont have to swing for the fences every time in order to accomplish your goals. A well-conceived strategy, applied with consistency and skill, can bring the results you desire. In a mercurial world filled with shortcuts, get rich quick schemes, and the lure of easy answers, the humble bunt exemplifies the virtue of small steps. And once again, just as those poetry-minded commentators waxing rhapsodic always say, baseball has shown us the way.

Sources
Statistics and scores for games played during the 2011 season were sourced online from both Yahoo (sports.yahoo.com/mlb) and MLB.com. Historical batting statistics come courtesy the Lahman Baseball Database, available for download online at seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics.

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