Doug’s Dime: Is the baseball #bunt going extinct

In the Moneyball era of baseball, an axiom of the optimized analytics of baseball was that bunting was for suckers, and that in general, teams should not bunt because trading an out (valuable) for a base advancement (less valuable) in the aggregate sufficiently reduces scoring. This has made bunting — and those skilled at bunting — less valuable on the playing field. Well, the thing about Moneyball-style analytics is that it’s an economic system, one where under-valued commodities might be spotted by optimization-seeking teams and thereby exploited. This is exactly what has happened in Tampa Bay, which bunts relentlessly — 134 bunts in 2025, more than anyone in Major League Baseball since 2016 and the most in the American League since 2011 — and had the best batting average in the AL either way. This is partly because bunters got cheap, and the Rays are stingy with payroll at 27th place in the MLB. It also helps that other teams are so rusty at fielding bunts that the Rays are succeedi