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A bunt is a batting technique in baseball or fastpitch softball. Official Baseball Rules define a bunt as follows: "A bunt is a batted ball not swung at, but intentionally met with the bat and tapped slowly within the infield." To bunt, the batter loosely holds the bat in front of home plate and intentionally taps the ball into play.
The player at the plate must also lay down a quality bunt. That is, the player must lay down a bunt that does not pop up, go foul, or go straight to a fielder. Even if all goes well, if the sacrifice bunt is successful, the team must still get a hit to score the runner, and they now have 2 outs remaining instead of three. [5] [6]
The batter bunts the ball, expecting to be thrown out at first base, but providing the runner on third base an opportunity to score. Such a bunt is most common with one out. [1] According to Baseball Almanac, the squeeze play was invented in 1894 by George Case and Dutch Carter during a college game at Yale University. [2]
Many years later, when it became clear that a batter might hit foul balls endlessly in an effort to get a good pitch to hit, the pitcher was given a break by a rule (NL 1901, AL 1903) that declared any foul ball to be a strike unless there were already two strikes on the batter. After the bunt came into existence as a strategy, it became clear ...
There were 786 bunt hits in Major League Baseball in 2003. The number fell to 693 by 2006, 567 in 2016 and 386 in 2019. Following the pandemic-shortened season of 2020, the number of bunt hits ...
Cincinnati Reds outfielder Bubba Thompson squares up to bunt in the eighth inning during a MLB spring training baseball game, Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024, at Goodyear Ballpark in Goodyear, Ariz.
A change-up pitch that appears to arrive at homeplate so slowly that a batter can make three swings and misses on a single pitch. Whiff-whiff-whiff, three strikes and the batter is out. The reference is to Bugs Bunny, the animated cartoon character, who is depicted employing such a pitch in the cartoon Baseball Bugs.
Slap bunting is an offensive baseball and softball technique wherein the batter attempts "to hit the ball to a place on the infield that's farthest from the place where the out needs to be made". [ 1 ]