Think about Baseball

You can't talk about the Tampa Bay Rays' performance this season without mentioning the bunt. This season, the Rays' offense is characterized by three things: Avoiding strikeouts Hitting to the opposite field Flexible use of the bunt Watching Rays games, you'll notice they aggressively attempt bunts even with a runner on third. Using 2026 season data, I took a quick look at this strategy through the lens of wOBA. High wOBA The most striking feature of bunts is their high wOBA. There have been 449 total bunts in the majors this season (one at-bat ended in a strikeout on a bunt attempt), and the weighted average wOBA across teams — what Baseball Savant displays as league wOBA — sits at 0.505 . This is naturally elevated because sacrifice bunts (SH) are excluded from the wOBA denominator. Even when calculating wOBA from the full league-wide dataset, the figure remains high at 0.498 . If we add cases where at least one out was recorded on a sac bunt back into the denomi...