It’s easy to say Showalter made the wrong decision, because we know what happened. The Jays moved on. The Orioles went home. Britton never pitched. But there were other reasons it turned out the way it did, besides not using Britton in a tie game. To start with, there was Showalter’s choice to use Jimenez, who had pitched 21 innings against the Blue Jays during the season while giving up 15 runs. The only thing he had going for him was he was a starter and could give the Orioles multiple innings if he could keep the game tied. That wasn’t much of a help when he couldn’t make it through even one clean inning.
Joe Maddon faced the same questions—and the same criticism—after Game 2 of the 2017 National League Championship Series. Maddon left Cubs closer Wade Davis unused in the bullpen in the ninth inning of a 1–1 game at Dodger Stadium. Instead, he had Duensing (already in the game) begin the ninth inning, and then he went with John Lackey, a starter who was pitching on back-to-back days for the first time in his career. Perhaps predictably, Lackey walked Chris Taylor and served up a walkoff three-run home run to Justin Turner, giving the Dodgers a two games to none series lead.
How could you lose without using your best reliever?
“I really just needed [Davis] for the save tonight,” Maddon responded.
Sorry, Joe. The save isn’t important. The win—for the Cubs, rather than for any individual pitcher—is what matters, especially in a series you’re already trailing. Pitching Davis in the ninth and extending the game gave the Cubs the best chance of winning, even if it meant being forced to use someone else (even Lackey) to close out the game after you score in the 10th.
Would they have scored in the 10th? No guarantees, obviously. Dodgers closer Kenley Jansen had thrown just 13 pitches in the ninth inning (pitching in a tie game at home). He likely could have gone at least one more. But the guy leading off the 10th for the Cubs would have been Addison Russell, whose fifth-inning home run gave the Cubs their only run of the game.
Maddon said he only had Davis for one inning, because three days earlier he had thrown 44 pitches in 21/3 difficult innings to win Game 5 of the division series. But Maddon, for all his “new school” reputation, was actually very “old school” in how he used Davis, who was the Cubs closer for just one season before leaving as a free agent. Davis appeared in 59 regular-season games in 2017. Only one of those 59 appearances came in a tie game on the road.
The problem with using your closer when it’s tied on the road is you still need to get at least six more outs to win the game. You need to get through the bottom of the ninth, score in the top of the 10th and get three more outs in the bottom of that inning. If your closer is mostly a one-inning pitcher, using him when it’s tied means you’re either committing to extend him beyond his comfort zone or to using a different pitcher if a save situation arises later.
The counter-argument is that you might score six or seven runs in the top of the 10th, and then anyone can close the game. And you don’t even get a chance to play the 10th unless you get through the ninth, and often your closer gives you the best chance to do it.
The best option is to avoid a hard and fast rule. Instead, consider how much the closer has pitched recently, what part of the order is coming up in the bottom of the ninth, and, just as importantly, who would you have coming up in the 10th. After all, if you’re not going to win the game in the 10th, someone else is almost certainly going to have to pitch, because it’s very unlikely you’d ask the closer to get more than six outs.
In the 2016 Wild Card Game, Showalter had his middle of the order up in the ninth inning. Setup man Brad Brach had pitched the bottom of the eighth, and after the middle of the O’s order didn’t produce a go-ahead run, Showalter stuck with Brach to begin the ninth. He finished the ninth with Darren O’Day, another quality setup guy, and had O’Day pitch a 1-2-3 10th inning, as well.
At that point, Showalter had another decision to make. He had the Blue Jays’ order about to flip over, with the ninth-place hitter leading off the inning but dangerous Josh Donaldson due up third and Encarnacion behind him. If he could get through the bottom of the 11th without losing the game, he had the middle of his order—Manny Machado, Mark Trumbo, and Matt Wieters—due up again in the top of the 12th. It was a perfect time to go to Britton, his best reliever. He went to Jimenez, and we know what happened.
No manager gets it right every time, not even one as good as Buck Showalter.
42. When You Play for One Run (or Is the Bunt Dead?)
EVEN THE WORST TEAM IN BASEBALL WINS most of the time after scoring the first run of a game. Even the best team in baseball loses most of the time when it doesn’t.
Don’t believe that? It’s true. The 2017 Dodgers won 104 games, but they were 34–41 when the opponent scored first. The 2017 Giants finished 40 games behind the Dodgers in the standings, but the Giants were 42–38 when they scored first.
As good as the Boston Red Sox were in 2018, with 108 wins, they were 34–39 when allowing the first run of a game.
So why doesn’t anyone ever play for one run again early in a game?
The simple answer is there are other numbers that show it doesn’t make sense, with so many home runs hit and with the knowledge that bunts are usually a low-value play.
The first-inning bunt has almost completely disappeared in the major leagues. As recently as 1979, the Minnesota Twins sacrificed successfully 24 times in the first inning. By 2017, all 30 major-league teams combined had just 35 successful sacrifices in the first inning. Ten teams didn’t have a single first-inning sacrifice all season; no team had more than four.
According to numbers from Baseball Prospectus, in 2017, teams score about 41 percent of the time when they began with a runner on first with no one out. Put that runner on second base with one out and the percentage goes down to 39. And that one out seriously lowers the chance at a big inning. Teams averaged .89 runs in an inning they began with a runner on first and nobody out, as opposed to .69 runs with a runner on second and one out.
Some bunts obviously result in hits or errors; some bunts don’t move the runner over or worse yet, end up as a double play. Some speedy hitters will try to bunt for a hit, knowing that even if they’re thrown out there’s a good chance they get the runner into scoring position.
Those bunts for a hit are fine. But even for a team like the 2017 Cleveland Indians, who were 55–6 when they led a game after two innings, an early sacrifice bunt didn’t make sense. Terry Francona’s team rarely used them, with only 23 sacrifice bunts all season.
Compare that to the 1954 Indians, who had almost as many sacrifices (107) as they did wins (111).
No team bunts anywhere near that often now. American League teams, whose pitchers come to the plate only in interleague road games, averaged just 18 sacrifices for the entire 2017 season. The only American League player who got to double-digits was Delino DeShields of the Texas Rangers, and many of his credited 13 sacrifice bunts were actually attempts to bunt for a hit.
DeShields’ manager was Jeff Banister, who is more willing than most to call for a bunt. In one 2018 game in New York, Banister had outfielder Carlos Tocci bunt with runners at first and second in the fifth inning of a game the Rangers trailed 5–1.
Tocci was a 22-year-old who was batting .185 with no home runs at the time. He was batting ninth, and the bunt set things up for leadoff hitter Shin-Soo Choo, whose double drove in two runs to get the Rangers back in the game.
“The game of baseball never stopped being played by players based on their skillset,” Banister said in explaining the bunt. “I’m an advocate of analytics, but they can’t quantify the pressure a pitcher is under when you move the runners. I know the probabilities very well, but I know who’s coming up, too.”
The probabilities are based on all the players in a given season and all the situations. Managers are paid to know their players and their team. But most teams in 2018 believed giving up an
out wasn’t good strategy in almost all situations, unless they had a pitcher at the plate.
There was a time when the stolen base seemed to be going the way of the sacrifice bunt, but that’s no longer the case. The stats say a steal can be worth the risk if the runner is successful at least 75 percent of the time. The best base stealers can top that 75 percent mark.
Dee Gordon was successful 79 percent of the time when he led the National League with 60 steals in 2017. Trea Turner was even better, with an 85 percent success rate on his 46 steals that season.
Alex Cora had the Boston Red Sox running more often after he took over as manager in 2018. It made sense, because the Sox had 125 steals while being caught just 31 times, for a team-wide 80 percent success rate.
“As long as that percentage is up there like the one we have, we’ll keep running,” Cora told reporters early in the season. “When it goes down—I think even 75 percent is giving outs away.”
Francona’s Indians ran even more often, with 135 steals in 2018, with a similar success rate to the Red Sox at 79 percent.
Overall, major-league teams averaged a steal every other game in 2018. As statistician, historian, and Red Sox executive Bill James pointed out, there were more stolen bases per game in 2018 than there had been in any season in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, or ’60s.
As bad as it looks to make a lot of outs on the bases, the three teams that made the most outs on the bases in 2017—the Red Sox, Yankees, and Astros—were a combined 68 games over .500. Part of that is simply a result of having a lot of baserunners, but it also shows being aggressive on the bases isn’t always a negative.
“You’ve got to think about the spot,” Cora told reporters early in 2018. “Does it change our chances of scoring in that spot? Does it make a big difference? That’s what I want them to understand.”
If you don’t ever make an out on the bases, it almost certainly means you’re leaving runs or opportunities to score runs out there. You’re not taking enough chances, and some of those times you played it cautious you would have scored an extra run.
Think about one of the most famous games in Red Sox history, and one of the most famous plays. It was Game 4 of the 2004 American League Championship Series and Francona’s Sox were three outs from getting swept by the Yankees. They needed to score at least one run in that inning or their season was over.
Mariano Rivera walked Kevin Millar to begin the ninth, and Francona made the decision to pinch-run Dave Roberts—and the decision to have Roberts steal second base.
“I kind of winked at him as he was going up the steps [of the dugout],” Francona told the Boston Globe years later. “I wanted him to know, ‘Hey, you can do this.’”
There was a risk Roberts would get thrown out, but Francona knew getting him to second base with no one out would greatly increase the Red Sox’s chances of scoring the one run they needed to extend their season. The chances of getting two more hits off Rivera weren’t good; to that point in his postseason career, he had faced 387 batters and allowed just 10 of them to score.
The Red Sox could have bunted, but that would have given them just two shots to get a game-tying hit against a guy who held batters to a .177 average in his first 67 postseason games. Roberts’ steal gave them three shots. According to Baseball-Reference.com, the steal raised the Red Sox’s chance of winning the game from 37 percent to 47 percent.
As it turned out, they needed just one shot. Bill Mueller followed the Roberts steal with a game-tying single. A David Ortiz 12th-inning home run gave the Red Sox one win, and before they were done they’d get three more over the Yankees and four over the Cardinals to win their first World Series since 1918.
As for Roberts, he got his first job as a major-league manager 12 years later with the Dodgers. His first year was 2016, and his team stole only 45 bases all season. Only three teams in the major leagues ran less than the Dodgers did.
A big part of the reason was that the Dodgers didn’t have any real basestealers in their lineup that year. But it was also true that Roberts and the Dodgers’ analytics-based front office were philosophically opposed to giving away outs. The 2016 Dodgers put down only 30 successful sacrifice bunts, the fewest in the National League and the third-lowest total in NL history at the time.
The Dodgers went to the National League Championship Series that year. They went to the World Series the next year.
So who’s to say they should have played for one run?
43. Thou Shall Not Sacrifice an Out
IT’S NOT JUST THAT TEAMS DON’T BUNT AS often as they once did. By 2018, some teams hardly ever bunted at all.
Take the Toronto Blue Jays, who had just five sacrifice bunts.
It wasn’t a misprint, and it wasn’t a lack of execution, either. If anything, it was an overstatement, because two of the times they got credit for a sacrifice, the batter was really bunting for a hit. And according to information from Baseball-Reference.com and review of game tapes, there was only one time all season a Blue Jays batter had unsuccessfully attempted to sacrifice.
Did the Blue Jays even have a bunt sign?
“We do have a sign,” manager John Gibbons said, pausing a moment before delivering his punch line. “Nobody knows it.”
Gibbons was speaking with about two weeks to go in the season, at a point when the Blue Jays still had just four credited bunts all year. Across the field, the New York Yankees began the night with 10 sacrifice bunts for the season, but third-base coach Phil Nevin admitted that was an exaggeration, too. Most of those were plays where the batter was bunting for a hit but got credit for a sacrifice because a runner advanced while the batter was thrown out at first.
“We do [have a bunt sign],” Nevin said with a smile.
Once a big part of baseball, the sacrifice bunt has simply gone out of style. While the Blue Jays were the record-setter, they weren’t really an outlier.
Before 2018, the record for fewest sacrifices in a season was eight, by the 2016 Boston Red Sox. Four of the 15 American League teams finished the 2018 season with fewer than eight.
And while the overall National League numbers are skewed because many pitchers can’t hit and thus are still asked to bunt, six NL teams were in single digits for sacrifice bunts by position players. The Philadelphia Phillies had just six all season, and all but two of those were players bunting for a hit.
Phillies manager Gabe Kapler said even on the rare occasions he does ask players to bunt, he still prefers they try to bunt for a hit rather than simply give up an out.
Kapler strongly believes in challenging baseball orthodoxy, but his reluctance to give away an out simply to advance a runner (or two runners) by 90 feet puts him closer to the mainstream today. Not only do the numbers show that bunting is most often a low-value play, but with more and more hitters in a typical lineup capable of hitting the ball out of the park, it just doesn’t make sense to regularly give away outs.
As Earl Weaver wrote in Weaver on Strategy, “There are only three [outs] an inning, and they should be treasured. It’s such a basic fact that fans sometimes forget it, but an inning doesn’t last 15 minutes or six batters or 20 pitches; it lasts three outs. Give one away and you’re making everything harder for yourself.”
Weaver is also credited with saying: “When you play for one run, that’s usually all you get. I have nothing against the bunt in its place, but most of the time, that place is in the bottom of a long-forgotten closet.”
What’s funny is that even with that belief, Weaver once had his Baltimore Orioles team put down 85 sacrifice bunts in a season. No team in the majors will reach that total in today’s game, and very few will get halfway there. Even in his final season with the Orioles, when the AL had adopted the designated hitter rule and Weaver had become more bunt-adverse, the O’s had 33 sacrifice bunts in 1986. It was one of the lowest totals in the majors that season; in 2018, it would
have tied for the most in the American League.
There are still exceptions, depending on the hitter and the pitcher but also on the game situation. If you’re in the bottom of the ninth inning of a tie game, the average number of runs you would score doesn’t matter, because you only need one to win. The numbers still give you a better chance to win with a runner on first and none out than with a runner on second and one out, but the advantage is slight enough that other factors—who’s hitting and who’s pitching—could swing it the other way.
There’s even more reason to bunt with a runner on second base and none out in the bottom of the ninth (or extra innings) with the game tied. Using numbers compiled by Tom Tango, the win expectancy goes up slightly (from .807 to .830) if you move the runner over to third.
That makes sense, because with a runner on third in that situation, the opponent has to bring the infield and outfield in. You go from needing a hit to win a game to winning it almost any time the batter makes contact. As long as it’s not a ground ball or line drive directly at an infielder, or a pop fly or very short fly ball, you’re going to score the winning run.
That’s why one of the few times Kapler asked his player to sacrifice, it was in the 12th inning, at home, with a runner on second and no one out. J.P. Crawford, the next batter, was 3-for-29 at the time. Crawford bunted successfully and after the Cincinnati Reds walked Cesar Hernandez, Scott Kingery followed with a walkoff sacrifice fly.
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