Will the Atlanta Braves become the first team to never lay down a sacrifice bunt?

Will the Atlanta Braves become the first team to never lay down a sacrifice bunt?

No team has ever completed a full 162-game MLB season without laying down a sacrifice bunt.

What? Say that again.

No team has ever completed a full 162-game MLB season without laying down a sacrifice bunt.

The Atlanta Braves are now just eight games away from making baseball history by becoming the first team to never lay down a sacrifice bunt.

This may seem like a side note, something that has no real bearing on baseball other than as an asterisk in future almanacs, and perhaps it is. But there is a serious point to be made here on what this represents.

A bunt is the simplest of actions, and the most polemic of plays in baseball. Traditionalists will tout the bunt as good strategy. Trading a likely out to get a runner into scoring position is simply good baseball. But in the analytics-driven tactics of the last two decades, bunting has come to be seen as a bad trade-off.

In their ever-increasing efforts to boil baseball down to a single formula, sabermetricians have placed a mathematical value on outs that is higher than the value of a runner’s base placement. In looking at teams between 1993 and 2010, a runner on first with no outs would have a .941 scoring average, whereas a runner on second with one out is a .721 scoring average.

Traditionalists will argue that this ignores the chaotic nature of putting the ball in play, where anything could happen. Arguing that baseball has been played very successfully for well over a century and a half utilizing the same basic tactics, that studying the likelihood is all very well, but sometimes you need to get that runner onto second more than you need that out in your back pocket.

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