Grit Your Teeth, Texas, And Bunt

It's late June, which can only mean one thing: nothing. The sports calendar this time of year is an endless procession of fractionally significant MLB games and nothing else save the occasional weirdo at a soccer game and the NBA and NHL drafts. 

So you might be interested in carving out some time for the College World Series championship series, which begins tonight and will be an exercise in contrasts. LSU is a baseball edition of the Tigers' 2007 football national champions, all gorillas with chainsaws where the sun don't shine. They've jacked 103 home runs this year, sport a team-wide on-base percentage of .408 and have generally bludgeoned opponents into submission.

Texas, on the other hand, is David Eckstein writ large, except without the actually being pretty sucky. They love pitching (team ERA: 2.88, first nationally), defense, and small ball. Longhorns coach Augie Garrido is obsessed with sacrifice bunts:

"If hitting is the hardest thing in sports, then why in the hell are you going to concentrate on trying to beat someone with hitting? You simply look to find something else. Bunting is so much easier."

Texas has laid down 102 sacrifices this year. This, of course, goes against every fiber of the sabermetrician's being even at a major league level. In college, where pitchers can be iffy, .320 averages are commonplace, and the aluminum bat rules, laying down a bunt is a sin against math.

Cue major consternation in the Texas blogosphere. Barking Carnival assembled and deployed the numbers conclusively:

[T]he important thing is that our team, just like the national average, scored more runs per inning and scored at least one run more often in runner on 1st and no outs situations than they did in runner on second and one out situations. We [Texas] gave up about 1/4 of a run each time we bunted that runner over and decreased our likelihood of scoring even a single run by 3-4%.

...and concluded thusly:

In summary, STOP BUNTING AUGIE!

Burnt Orange Nation followed that up with an even longer post referencing the BC post which came to the same conclusion: "he's simply wrong about sacrifice bunting."

This isn't a program-wrecking flaw, obviously, but it is the kind of coaching blindness that drives fans nuts, like refusing to foul when you're up three or severe mismanagement of the two-minute drill. As you watch tonight, have a thought for the Texas blogosphere on the edge of its seat, cursing the quarter-run they're giving up every time one of their thumping middle-of-the-order hitters pulls an Eckstein with his metal bat.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.