On the Efficiency of the Sacrifice Bunt in the Universal DH Era

On Saturday, the Detroit Tigers pulled off a truly delightful 1-5-4 double play. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and a video even more, so I’ll save everyone a lot of work and show it to you.

If you’re reading this, and you’re old enough to have lived through the war between small ball and sabermetrics in the early part of this century, you’re probably delighted to see a sacrifice bunt go awry like this. I lived through college baseball in the early-to-mid-2010s — if there was a war over sabermetrics, college ball at this time was its Stalingrad — so that was definitely my first reaction as well.

The pro-sacrifice bunt argument relied on a pair of assumptions that don’t hold water: First, that a hitter who swings away will either reach base himself or fail to advance the runner, with no possibility of a productive out coming through natural means. Second: If the offensive manager tries to trade an out for a base through a sac bunt, he’ll get what he paid for. A strikeout, or a fielder’s choice, or even a double play is a negligible risk.

This play might’ve given me flashbacks to the accursed 2014 College World Series game between Texas and UC Irvine, which featured six sacrifice bunts and represents the nadir of small ball in my mind, but a closer examination shows more nuanced thinking.

The batter on this play was Jake Rogers, Chicago’s backup catcher and no. 9 hitter. Rogers, who’d spent parts of 10 seasons in the Tigers organization, had just received a standing ovation from the Detroit fans as he dug in for his first plate appearance as a visitor to Comerica Park.

The warm reception makes what happened later even funnier, but it probably overstates how dangerous Rogers is at the plate. Rogers is the most consistent 70 wRC+ guy alive, which goes a long way toward explaining how he’s on his fourth team in three weeks. There aren’t many situations where the analytics call for a sacrifice bunt — especially in the second inning — but runners on first and second with nobody out and a bad hitter at the plate is an ideal time to trade an out for a base.

Rogers, with eight successful sac bunts in nearly 1,100 major league plate appearances, isn’t exactly Eddie Collins. But the Tigers could not have executed this play better. Troy Melton, having seen Rogers square around, gave his former teammate 96 in the kidneys — an incredibly difficult pitch to bunt accurately. Melton then came off the mound like Spider-Man to collect the ball and threw it quickly and accurately to Hao-Yu Lee for the first out; Lee then relayed the ball to Gleyber Torres, who’d moved down to cover first base, to complete the double play.

Genuinely exquisite fundamental infield defense, and the Tigers were understandably thrilled. When the broadcast came back from the mid-inning break, Melton and Lee were still reliving their adventures in the dugout, like two teenagers who’d pulled off a particularly impressive alley-oop on the basketball hoop in the swimming pool.

Dudes rock.

Having gotten this taste of a sacrifice bunt backfiring, I — being dispassionate about and unbothered by this topic, as you can tell by the fact that I’m still mad about a 12-year-old college game in which I had no rooting interest — was eager to find more plays like it.

Would you like to know how many sac bunt attempts this year have led to more than one out?

Four. That includes Rogers’ bunt on Saturday, which is the first bunt double play of 2026 that didn’t come on a popup. That is, suffice it to say, far less than the historical norm.

Are big leaguers getting better at bunts? Maybe. More than anything, they’re not bunting as often as they used to.

And there’s a confounding variable here: the universal DH. If you take 2020, and 2022 through the present, you’ll get 39 bunt double plays in total. That’d be a slow year in any season that didn’t have the universal DH.

A bunt was the norm whenever a pitcher came up with runners on first and/or second with less than two outs, basically from the dawn of time until October 2021. And because everyone knew a bunt was coming when a pitcher came to bat with a runner on base, the defense could sell out to get the lead runner.

Once I generated the list of bunt double plays on Baseball Savant, I picked one more or less at random.

Look how far Maikel Franco is cheating up the third base line. You couldn’t do that with a position player; even Rogers is a bigger danger to pull back and slug a ball through the hole than Wei-Yin Chen would’ve been. Not that it mattered; even with both corner infielders charging, Chen bunted the ball right back to the pitcher, and you can see the result.

Now that position players have had the sole responsibility for bunting for a few years (absent aberrant circumstances like Miles Mikolas’ extra-inning squeeze bunt earlier this month), are they getting better? Are defenses getting better at turning these bunts into outs?

I want to say that table doesn’t tell the whole story, but to be totally honest I’m not really sure what it tells you. It’s time to come up with a stat.

For all bunt attempts in a sacrifice situation (runners on but third base empty, less than two outs) in the universal DH era, I compiled the total number of bases gained and the number of outs recorded. A successful sacrifice with one runner on is one base for one out. A sacrifice with runners on first and second is two bases for one out.

The possibilities are numerous: A foul bunt with two strikes is zero bases for one out. A base hit or an error with one on is two bases (one each for the runner and batter-runner) for no outs.

It’s possible for a batter to bunt and advance one or more runners without reaching base himself, and to be credited with a groundout instead of a sacrifice. Here’s an example from earlier this year.

Derek Hill placed that ball perfectly, pushing it to the first base side as Brent Suter came off the mound in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, Suter recovered and managed to flip the ball to first before Hill — who can scoot — got there. Great bunt by Hill, better defense by Suter. Tough (but correct) decision by the official scorer to deny Hill a sacrifice hit.

Scoring decisions like these are usually rare — fewer than 10 per season — though in 2022 there were more than 20 non-sacrifice bunt groundouts that advanced runners. The official scorers were hard to please that year. There’s also one instance of a bunt double play that still advanced the lead runner from second to third, so that gets credited with one base and two outs.

Reducing all bunts to one ratio flattens context, but this will get us in the proverbial ballpark.

The verdict: This is a good bunt year. Already, bunters in sacrifice opportunities have nearly matched last year’s universal DH-era record for bases gained — by the time you’re reading this they might’ve broken it — while spending 11% fewer outs to get there. And there’s still another month and change to go in the regular season.

Poor Jake Rogers, then. Not only was his the first bunt ground-into-double-play of 2026, an unsuccessful sacrifice attempt of any kind is unusual in this golden age of position player bunting.

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