Moneyball concept in High School?

I think the value of the bunt in HS ball is directly related to the game situation, opponent and where you are in the batting order.

Since most teams can't go more than 4 or 5 deep with solid hitters giving away an out with the No. 2 batter is probably going to be bad strategy.

On the other hand if your 7 scratches a single and then 8 gets HBP, then bunting the No.9 makes a lot more sense.

Also the level of the opponent.  If you have them outclassed - never bunt and give away an out.  Pound away.  If you are going to be in a dog fight with a DI pitcher on the hill against you, getting runners moved can have value if you think it will be a 2-1 or 3-2 type of game.

Two other factors...partly already mentioned - level of competition and players is too spread out for the concept to have as much traction IMO and there simply aren't enough games. 

Moneyball's strength is that the level of competition is consistent and relatively equal and that over a huge number of games the small differences matter.  Simply not the case in HS.  20-25 game seasons where are good team will overwhelm maybe 2/3 of its opponents mean it is a 10 game season.  Finding the situational reliever that might get lefties out in the 7th really doesn't equate to HS baseball where most pitching staffs are 3 or 4 deep at best and might all be right handed.      

Agree with luv baseball.  Also, that tough D1 pitcher on the hill may  not have a D1 defense behind him.  Good sac bunts turn into outs a very high percentage of the time in MLB.  In HS not so much. 

Originally Posted by Passion4baseball:

Does anyone think the Moneyball theory would work in high school baseball?  Obviously not talking about paying players but the other stuff like on base percentage being the most important stat to look at and thinking that bunting is a wasted out when there are only 21 outs in a high school game.

It does work to some degree, but a lot depends on the coach, his philosophies, and the talent he has available. The main thing to understand is, THERE IS NO ONE STAT THAT TELLS EVERYTHING!  The fellow I score for now loves OBP. The fellow I used to score for was driven by BA and OBP, and one of the most successful coaches in the area is a nut for RC. But all of them use their “favorite” to get a feel for what his hitters are doing, then they look at other metrics to get a better picture. Personally I’m an OPS guy but moving toward RC.

Bunting is something else again. If you don’t have the horses to take advantage of moving the runners up, it really is a wasted out and that’s bad. In GENERAL, if the bunt is successfully put into play, the chances of the batter reaching 1^st safely are quite a bit better than in higher levels of the game simply because the fielders get better the higher you go. But as an offensive weapon, its really impossible to say how much success it would have without knowing a lot about the other hitters on the team.

Moneyball isn't about tactical baseball strategy, it's about understanding the relative value of particular baseball skills at a strategic level in the marketplace of professional baseball. It's got far more in common with quants and Wall Street than it really does with tactical baseball decisions.

HS baseball doesn't have remotely the sort of free market for talent/skills that pro ball does, so identifying undervalued skills in your player pool, to the extent that you could do so with easily available information, has much less value. I mean, you can't just freely swap skill sets by trading guys or signing a FA, for instance.

That said, there are no doubt strategies that are poorly matched to player skill sets by coaches at the HS level (or any other level, I suppose) all the time, and you could apply some sabermetric ideas/processes towards identifying what does/doesn't work for the players/environment you do have to work with. It's going to be hard to do it systematically/scientifically given the general time/data constraints a typical HS program faces combined with the "old school" mentality that might be more prevalent at lower levels where profit motive doesn't ultimately come into play to winnow out sub-optimal strategies faster.

But in the end, what wins ball games at any level is the same, score more runs than the other guy. And it should be possible to quantify and improve the skills that lead to that in useful ways if you got the time/motivation to do so.

Less a "moneyball" comment, and more of a bunting one:  I believe bunting in high school is very valuable, considering the makeup of the bats.

Now that they've been around a few years, there's no doubt that at the high school level, there just aren't a huge number of kids that are going to square it up on a regular basis.  The inability to consistently square up the baseball + a lower defensive skill set = success in my mind.

And for me, I don't care if it's your No. 3 who's doing it.  (Of course, in high school, one would assume that those at the top of the order are better bunters than those at the bottom as well)

Put differently...I view the bunt as an offensive weapon, not a defensive giveaway.

GoHeels,

I agree on the value of bunting in HS, but not necessarily because of the bats. I agree because it’s simply a good strategy at that level.

What you said about bunting relative to the batting order intrigued me because it’s not something I ever considered, so I took a look.

Some caveats. Although the I began tracking sacs in 2007, I didn’t begin tracking bunt hits until 2013, and the results are only for our team. I really didn’t have any idea how the numbers would spread out, but it doesn’t kind of whack you in the face that 3 thru 6 is allowed to swing the bat much more than the others. It seems logical since those are the guys generally thought of as the run producers, but I didn’t think it would be quite that easy to see. I’ll prolly include the bunts on another report that has some hitting metrics on it to get a better idea about what’s happening.

Thanx for turning on a light in this old brain.

That'd be a lot more interesting report with OPS for each batting order position included (and probably reach on error for bunt attempts). IMO, that's way too few bunt hits, relative to the SACs, to be bunting that much for pretty much every position in the order.

Bunting at the HS level should primarily be a weapon to put guys on base, not to move runners in exchange for outs.

Stats,

Thanks for some great data.

Your HS team sac bunted five times more often than the HS my sons attended.

Your HS team sac bunted at a rate of about 2 sacs per game in the past two seasons.

The HS my sons attended sac bunted at a rate of .4  per game in the past four seasons..

The above assumes that your team played a total of 60 games in the two years you recorded bunt data

freddy77,

Just to see what it would look like, I ran it for both us and our opponents from 2007 thru 2014. Se the attachment bbpos.pdf. The 1^st page is ours, the 2^nd our opponents. I think it’s pretty obvious our coach saw bunting as much more of a weapon than most other coaches.

The attachment obpos.pdf is something I threw in to see if I could add some context and represent 67 games. The 1^st page is our guys after 04/09/2012. The 2^nd is our opponents for the same period. Again, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see our coach used foot speed and base running skills one heck of a lot more than most other coaches, and was successful doing it.

I agree.

The sabremetic mindset is based on professional baseball.

HS players are much more affected by momentum and contagion than pro players.

In HS, bunting can change or create momentum, and can ignite contagion.

Other things that need to be considered when looking at raw data are the situations that one could have been in.

It is clear that Gnats' team not only utilizes the bunt as an offensive play, but also seems to run the bases A LOT more than their opponents.  The number of total bases is also substantially higher than opponents.

It seems that there are more '0' out situations with runners in scoring position, where the bunts are being utilized.  Whether that is from a single and a steal, or a leadoff double. And/or the obvious 1st and 2nd with no outs, as well.  This is where the bunt is best utilized as an offensive weapon vs. simply "giving away outs".

My takeaway in the data, is that Gnats' team found themselves in these situations quite regularly, whereas their opponents, against them, did not. 

The file including SACs and OBP/OPS don't seem to have the same ratios of SACs to bunt hits as in the first file you posted (specifically, there seem to be a lot more bunt hits).  Even so, the number of sac bunts seems excessive given that essentially everyone listed has an OBP of .400+.  Giving away outs when you're 40+% likely to get on base otherwise is definitely going to be sub-optimal.  Your opponents numbers seem to be more in line efficiency-wise, guys with poorer OBP skills bunt more (with the exception of the fascination everyone seems to have with bunting from the 2 hole). This is also true of the relative bunt frequencies of your team and their opponents in the first file.

I did some back of the napkin math a while back that suggested that you need to bat in roughly the same neighborhood as a mediocre NL pitcher for bunting a lot to be optimal. This is more true the higher the run environment, and due to HS defenses typically being a lot rougher, should lead to less bunting in HS in an optimal scenario. That would be balanced (possibly a lot) by the fact that those same poorer defenses would have more trouble with bunt defense, but I'd expect that to show up in the stats as more bunt hits and ROE relative to the number of SACs shown here, if the bunts the hitters were putting down were designed to take advantage of the defense rather than be primarily about moving runners. Bunts designed primarily to move runners over are going to be sub-optimal in most HS situation.

Bunting for a hit in HS is a good idea for some players.  The sac bunt was very overused by sons coach.  his philosophy is to bunt every time a player gets on first with no outs, or one out in many situations regardless of batter or inning.  I can't tell you how many times our one hole got on base, two hole bunts gets out at first then 3 is walked, 4 hits into DP. In high school you don't play as many 1-0, 2-1 games so the out is more valuable than the base.

When my son was in high school, if there was no one on or a runner on first the first thing he did coming to the plate was look to see who was playing third and where he was positioned. If the third baseman wasn't a couple of steps up on the grass he took the free hit.

I think there are 2 things that nake bunting in HS a valuable.  A)HS players can not play catch on a consistent basis.  B)making a decision while moving in space is difficult for an average HS player to make.  

where as the pro's can do both at a high rate.

Originally Posted by IEBSBL:

I think there are 2 things that nake bunting in HS a valuable.  A)HS players can not play catch on a consistent basis.  B)making a decision while moving in space is difficult for an average HS player to make.  

where as the pro's can do both at a high rate.

That’s very true indeed, but I think a lot of people don’t understand that just as those things are true about the defense, putting a bunt in play isn’t exactly automatic. It hard to believe how many people think HS players all know how to bunt, when in truth it’s close to being rare. In the end, bunts take a lot of work both offensively and defensively.

When I watch teams practice bunt coverages or bunting in BP, I’d say most of the time the players were “walking through” work without much effort. Our coach would go off like a neutron bomb on players “dogging it” practicing bunts and bunt coverages. He took it very seriously, and but the end of a player’s 1^st season under him, they’d either take it seriously as well, or they’d find themselves in a doghouse very difficult to get out of.

I agree.  That is why we bunt everyday and the bunts have direct relation to how many free swings they get.  We bunt everyday that we hit!