Is Bunting Bad For Your Club?

With Spring Training just around the corner, I thought to jump right in to analyzing some baseball statistics. A Research Methods class lecture the other day inspired me to look at the relationships between last year's wins and various hitting statistics of each team. Just for kicks, I took the correlations of wins versus Runs Scored (RS), Runs Allowed (RA), H, 2B, 3B, HR, Total Bases (TB), OBP, SLG, OPS, BB, SO, Stolen Bases (SB), and Sacrifice Hits (SH). While it would be better to use years and years worth of data, I was just foolin' around with these numbers from the past year.

The data can be found here.

Here are the correlations:

v. W	r
RA	-0.652
RS	0.616
OBP	0.614
OPS	0.560
BA	0.496
TB	0.493
H	0.479
SLG	0.465
BB	0.378
2B	0.300
HR	0.187
SO	-0.173
SH	-0.166
SB	0.141
3B	0.013

Here are some of my thoughts:

• It's no surprise that Runs Allowed and Runs Scored are the two strongest relationships with winning baseball games. After all, in order to win a game, you need to outscore your opponent. Run Differential, which is just RS-RA, is used often among baseball analysts to assess the quality of a baseball club. While run differential can't predict short-run success (i.e. World Series), it is very helpful to predict long-term success in the win column. Moreover, of the eight playoff teams this year, five placed in the top 10 in RA and six placed in the top 10 in RS.
  
• Number of sacrifice hits has an inverse correlation with victories. Sacrificing an out to get a runner over is a costly move, a move that many, like A's GM Billy Beane, don't think the reward is worth the risk. One way to interpret this correlation is that those who lay down bunts probably have little power and thus, have developed skills in moving the guys over to compensate for their lack of hitting ability. In other words, bunting may be a product of having poor hitting skills. A coach wouldn't want David Ortiz bunting in a high pressure situation, would he? But if Julio Lugo is up to bat, Francona may signal to drop the bunt down. Managers may claim that he'll put on the bunt because the batter is "speedy" and "scrappy" but he probably means that he's "not a good hitter." There's a reason why players like Juan Pierre and Omar Vizquel and pitchers lead their league in sacrifice hits.
  
• Sidenote: what's also interesting here is that the Rockies had the most sacrifice hits. That's right-- the Rockies. While it's typical to find a National League team leading the league in sacrifice hits, it is unusual to see the National League Champion at the top of the list. The data does not include postseason victories but, I found they bunted 5 times in 11 games in the postseason which is pretty close to the 83:163 ratio during the regular season, leaving out the possibility that they changed their strategy in the playoffs.
  
• Home runs are pretty low on this list, lower than doubles and walks. One would think that having a home run hitter would always be a great thing for winning games. Keep in mind, home run hitters will swing for the fences but will also tend to swing and miss more than others. I ran an analysis and found that home runs are the most highly correlated statistic with strikeouts. (r = .595). Free swingers, if you will. Think Richie Sexson.

Correlations certainly have their limits in analysis but last year's data produces some interesting material to look at. Feel free to discuss further.