The Shrine

Today I was reading about how Aybar was bunting while down 3-0 when the other team had a no hitter going and that apparently broke some unwritten rule in baseball.

Now that rule makes far less sense than the unwritten rule of Japanese baseball manga, which is that you never walk (intentional or otherwise) someone with a slugging percentage greater than 1. For some background, Japanese fictional baseball tends to involve games that look more like 1 versus 1. You usually have a guy who has some ridiculous offensive statistics like slugging for 3.000 against a pitcher that gives up 0.25 ERA, and everyone on the team besides your super batter is generally horrendously bad, probably due to the presence of superhuman pitchers. Although this unwritten rule seems silly, if you imagine you actually are in a world where one guy hits a home run 75% of the time while everyone else struggle to break .100 batting average, it'd make sense why such a rule exists. Otherwise all games would result in your best guy getting walked every single time and end up as pitching duels that go on for 30 innings. It'd make sense whatever fictional entity in charge of said sports would strongly discourage people from walking the one guy who can actually score because the sports would be unwatchable otherwise. It would not be unlike how NBA put rules to prevent Hack-a-Shaq even though it was an effective strategy, because it makes very boring/unwatchable basketball.

But not bunting against a no hitter makes no sense to me. It's not like this is some secret move you use that will get you on base all the time. I guess the argument is that because the other side isn't expecting you to bunt so it's somehow dishonorable. This ignores the fact that bunting is extremely unlikely to succeed if the other side know you're bunting, so of course you'll only bunt in situation where you think the defense isn't expecting it! I can understand with wanting to see no hitters/perfect game, and if bunting is some cheesy way of getting on base reliably that'd at least have some basis. For example, if bunting is like giving the ball to LeBron and have him run over 3 guys and hope they call a foul on the defender, I can see people view that as kind of cheap. But there is absolutely no indication that bunting is a reliable way of getting on base. It's certainly not used more often than the normal ways of getting on base, and it's definitely not very hard to stop even if you're not specifically trying to stop it.

Bunting against a no-no late in the game is cheesy. It draws ire much like it would if a guy SCV rushed you in a top level StarCraft tournament. Bunting is legal, yes, and a valid way to get a hit just like an SVC rush still results in a win, but its not exactly how the game was intended to be played. If someone is pitching ridiculously out of his mind, you need to man up and get a real hit to end it. The pitcher deserves his feat to be busted in a proper fashion. Something like ending a no-hitter or a perfect game is above the current game being played, for the moment. The defense for Aybar was that he was still trying to win the game, which of course is the point of playing baseball, but in these situations you need to forget the game, and the score, and focus on the pure hitter vs. pitcher battle (which means swining) that is going on and how the pitcher is aiming for something that isnt very common.

So are you saying you're not intended to get on base by bunting? Is bunting somehow an easier way of getting on base compared to a fullswing? It sure isn't used as if it's better than swinging. Again this isn't some kind of powerful go-to move that would make competition very boring. If SCV rush is actually a very strong move that can reliably beat most strat it'd make sense to ban it, in the same way that fictional baseball bans walking a batter with slugging percentage of greater than 1.000 (because it'd make very uninteresting fictional baseball even though it'd always be the correct thing to do).

If bunting is just a cheesy way to get on base then you should see people open by bunting all the time, since after all the point of baseball is to get on the base. It'd be similar to the LeBron bulldozer move which is certainly used all the time by LeBron since it's a very reliable way to put himself in an advantageous position. Yet bunting happens a lot less than swinging, and is generally stopped rather easily unless you caught the defense asleep. Some people consider zone defense cheap too, but the zone defense at least does work some of the time. I cannot think of a game where bunting on a regular basis is a remotely viable strategy.