MarisFan61
....re what baseball-reference.com does for "balls in play" (in case anyone's still looking here......btw if you aren't now, people will eventually -- these articles are for posterity, and they show up prominently in google searches).....

I think I see what they're doing -- why they include sacrifice flies but not sacrifice bunts. It's not clear to me that it's the best way to do it, but I think I can see why. I wonder what other people think of it.

It gets into the 'philosophy' of sac bunts and sac flies; not mainly what the players or what the teams think of them, but what an analyst thinks of them, and what we think of them. And I suspect that baseball-ref.com is seeing this differently than players and teams do.

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In trying to understand what baseball-ref.com is doing, we have to remember the context: The main reason they're deriving "balls in play" is to calculate batting average on balls in play. So, I guess they're just looking for what's most relevant for that.

I guess the reason they use sac flies but not sac bunts as an 'addend' to get "balls in play" is, they view sac bunting as "giving yourself up" -- you're not trying to get a hit -- but they don't view sac flies as giving yourself up; they consider it as though you were really trying to get a hit but you just didn't. Or maybe it's a little different than that: Maybe they're not viewing it in terms of what's in the hitters' heads but just in terms of what they think is the likelihood of getting a hit if you're bunting vs. if you're hitting fly balls. Heck, there's all kinds of ways of viewing how they're viewing it: maybe they hardly believe at all in "trying to hit a fly ball"; they figure that at least for the most part, the guy is trying to get a hit, as usual.

My own take on all those things is, sure there's a difference, and there's some tendency 'in favor of' bunts in all those respects. But it's not absolute, and I don't think we know that it's large.
Except on this one thing: Of course every time a player does a sac bunt, he was trying to bunt. :-)
That's not the case on sac flies.

But I think it's clear that a hitter's approach in a sac fly situation often is adapted for the purpose of maximizing the chance of a fly ball, just as the pitcher's approach often is adapted for the purpose of minimizing it. Also it's obvious that when a batter is sac bunting, he sometimes gets a hit; I imagine it's not as frequent as getting a hit when you're 'trying' to hit a fly ball, but it happens a fair amount.

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We might decide to either include or not include sac bunts and/or sac flies in "balls in play" according to the purpose of the moment. For something like looking at shifting tendencies, I think it makes no sense not to include both of them; on the other hand, when we're using balls-in-play for a purpose like calculating BABIP, we could see it differently, as baseball-ref.com does. I agree with them in the sense that I see it differently too -- but I not only wouldn't include sac bunts in the divisor for BABIP; I wouldn't include sac flies either.
2:06 AM Sep 16th

robneyer
Upon reading this sentence, "Note that all shift totals referenced in this article are shifts on balls in play", my first thought was hey, aren't there fewer balls in play this year than last year? And if so, wouldn't that mean that shifts are actually NOT down this year? Or at least not down by as much?​
2:30 PM Sep 13th

MWeddell
I don't think the OBP would be anywhere near .800 for batter who bunt against the shift.

About halfway down this article - https://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2017/3/11/14817934/bunt-hit-sacrifice-shift-cesar-hernandez-dee-gordon-billy-​hamilton - there's some data that says during 2010-16 the batting average when bunting against the shift was .521.

That figure though omits the cost of an added strike when a batter attempts a bunt against the shift but doesn't get the bunt down in fair terrirtory. An earlier article using sketchier data - www.fangraphs.com/blogs/more-about-bunting-and-beating-the-shift/ - indicates that about 62% of bunt attempts against the shift produced a strike, not a fair bunt attempt.


7:40 AM Sep 13th

MarisFan61
.....but when they move to that other position, that other position becomes what they work on. It becomes their "groove."

I mentioned the "selection" for the position as an additional factor, not the only.
4:14 PM Sep 12th

MattGoodrich
There must be an ego element to a player not bunting against a shift. I would think some players would end up with an .800 on base ave if they bunted, but they just can't bring themselves to do it. I see it in slow pitch softball - no matter how deep an outfielder is playing, some batters still try to hit it over their head, only to fly out.

Then again, with a big hitter up, maybe the defense would take an .800 OB with every hit an infield single.
12:45 AM Sep 12th