Bunting

I hate bunting. If you could actually get a hit off of it, like Brett Butler used to do, OK. But sacrifice bunts are the stupidest play in baseball.

Last summer, I was at a Tacoma-Albuquerque AAA game. Tacoma was killing Albuquerque's pitchers. It was obvious in the 1st inning that the guy had nothing. 2 men get on right away. Then, Tacoma's manager has Wladimir Balentien, the #3 hitter and now Seattle's right fielder, lay down a sacrifice bunt. He got it down. The runners were moved. Then the next hitter, Adam Jones, smashed a home run and the rout was on. Tacoma scored 7 in the first and 20 for the game. So why lay down the sacrifice bunt? Why give up an out to get runners over? Maybe if it is an NL game and the pitcher is up. Outside of that, never. And certainly not with a power hitter in that situation.

This brings us to a post from Fire Joe Morgan, where Houston manager Cecil Cooper says the following about his best hitter (and the man who should be the frontrunner for NL MVP) Lance Berkman:

Even slugger Lance Berkman, one of the hottest hitters in baseball this season, resorted to dropping a bunt single in the eighth inning, with the Astros down by four. It was only the second bunt single of his career and first since 2002.

"That's a good play," Cooper said of Berkman's decision to bunt with the third baseman playing him deep. "That's a baseball player's play. It's a nice job. We need baserunners. If you hit a ball out of a ballpark, I call them rally-killers when you get down like that. We need to keep a rally going, and that was a nice play to me."

Wow is that stupid. A home run is a rally killer. Huh.