Sacrifice Bunts Always Succeed

[Charlie Hough]

Apparently there has been a major coding change with sacrifice bunts. I am 84 games into a season where I'm managing all of my team's games, and both my club and all opponents have never failed to execute a sacrifice bunt successfully, across dozens of attempts.

Literally every sac bunt attempt has succeeded, with no runner ever thrown out at second and no batter ever fouling off a bunt with two strikes for an out. In fact, the fielders have never thrown to second to attempt to throw out the runner. Not once.

Every throw has gone to first, and every sac bunt attempt has succeeded. This is across across several dozen attempts involving both teams, even with third base playing in or both corners playing in.

Given all of the evidence and the fact that the defense has never thrown to second, I don't think there can be any reasonable argument that this is a sample size issue.

It doesn't matter what the batter's sac bunt rating is or the runner's speed is either. The sac bunt rating can be a 2, 3 or 5. A runner can have 2 or 3 speed and poor baserunning ratings. All attempts have succeeded with the runner on first advancing to second.

In past versions of OOTP, sacrifice bunt attempts failed at a fairly high rate and resulted in many instances of runners being thrown out at second, even with players who had very good sac bunt ratings and runners who had excellent speed. But now it appears that this may have been toned down to the point that sacrifice bunts are automatic successes.

Has anyone else seen this? If the game has been updated to tweak sacrifice bunts, I think it's time to revisit this. I'll continue to play out this season, but I've seen nothing to suggest that I'll ever see a sac bunt attempt fail.

[Bluenoser]

I can't speak to sample size because I haven't analyzed it deeply, but I have seen failed bunt attempts with throws to 2nd.

I've seen them with throws to 3rd when runners on 1st and 2nd as well. Nothing seems amiss to me. As I said though, I haven't paid an overly amount of attention to it.

[Syd Thrift]

My experience is that they fail around 20% of the times which is about the real life rates. Obviously your chances will be higher if the infield isn’t drawn in. Otherwise though I see sac bunts fail with annoying regularity in extra innings.

With fouling off a bunt with two strikes, it’s rare but I’ve seen it happen. One reason it’s so rare is that the AI will never ask a non-pitcher to bunt with 2 strikes, which… 100% might not be literally realistic but the best numbers I could find was that in the NL in 2018 there were 155 2 strike bunt attempts and all of 22 of them were tried by non-pitchers. At the very least it’s a very rare move.

[MathBandit]

My experience is that every sac bunt attempted is a failure since a 'successful' sac bunt decreases the total expected runs in an inning and doesn't change the odds of scoring the lead runner.

I know I've seen sac bunts go wrong when I watch YT content creators though, where the throw goes to second and either gets the runner or doesn't.

[David Watts]

[fredbeene]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Apparently there has been a major coding change with sacrifice bunts. I am 84 games into a season where I'm managing all of my team's games, and both my club and all opponents have never failed to execute a sacrifice bunt successfully, across dozens of attempts.

Literally every sac bunt attempt has succeeded, with no runner ever thrown out at second and no batter ever fouling off a bunt with two strikes for an out. In fact, the fielders have never thrown to second to attempt to throw out the runner. Not once.

Every throw has gone to first, and every sac bunt attempt has succeeded. This is across across several dozen attempts involving both teams, even with third base playing in or both corners playing in.

Given all of the evidence and the fact that the defense has never thrown to second, I don't think there can be any reasonable argument that this is a sample size issue.

It doesn't matter what the batter's sac bunt rating is or the runner's speed is either. The sac bunt rating can be a 2, 3 or 5. A runner can have 2 or 3 speed and poor baserunning ratings. All attempts have succeeded with the runner on first advancing to second.

In past versions of OOTP, sacrifice bunt attempts failed at a fairly high rate and resulted in many instances of runners being thrown out at second, even with players who had very good sac bunt ratings and runners who had excellent speed. But now it appears that this may have been toned down to the point that sacrifice bunts are automatic successes.

Has anyone else seen this? If the game has been updated to tweak sacrifice bunts, I think it's time to revisit this. I'll continue to play out this season, but I've seen nothing to suggest that I'll ever see a sac bunt attempt fail.

BUNK
If the data is not collected (AND after 23 version it is NOT collected) you are unable to run reports and analyze.
You are unable to validate your strategies are working

[fredbeene]

haha everyone's experience is manually tracking games they actually play out.
all unnecessary work
and playing everyyyyyyyyyy singlllllllllllle pitch is not feasible for many players that work, have other interests etc.

[beepollen]

FWIW, I just replayed the '53 National League, and there were plenty of failed sacrifice attempts.

[CraigBShuman]

I track bunts for my team and the opposing team. Both teams are successful about 70-73% of the time.
A caveat: I just finished playing 1965-1969. I don't know if era has an effect on player performance.

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by fredbeene

BUNK
If the data is not collected (AND after 23 version it is NOT collected) you are unable to run reports and analyze.
You are unable to validate your strategies are working

Trust me, I am collecting the data for analysis. Game logs show what happens pitch by pitch, even if you're playing games in single-pitch mode. I have all the pitch-by-pitch data for all 90 games I've played out so far, showing all successful sacrifice bunt attempts and no failures.

I'll eventually submit the game logs to OOTP Developments once I'm done with this season.

I don't attempt sacrifice bunts very often, but the AI managers in my 1979 historical save do it in almost every game, and often multiple times. If the batter gets two strikes during the at-bat, the AI will abandon the strategy. I do the same. But unless that happens, the sacrifice has literally worked in every case throughout the entire season, for both AI teams and my team.

Not once has it failed, no matter how the AI managers or I position the defense or what the player ratings are.

Like others here, I have always seen a failure rate of somewhere between 20% to 30% for sacrifice bunts in past versions of OOTP, as long as the ball is eventually bunted into play. But this is my first saved game with OOTP 23, and the results now represent a 100% total success rate over 90 games.

[MathBandit]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Trust me, I am collecting the data for analysis. Game logs show what happens pitch by pitch, even if you're playing games in single-pitch mode. I have all the pitch-by-pitch data for all 90 games I've played out so far, showing all successful sacrifice bunt attempts and no failures.

I'll eventually submit the game logs to OOTP Developments once I'm done with this season.

I don't attempt sacrifice bunts very often, but the AI managers in my 1979 historical save do it in almost every game, and often multiple times. If the batter gets two strikes during the at-bat, the AI will abandon the strategy. I do the same. But unless that happens, the sacrifice has literally worked in every case throughout the entire season, for both AI teams and my team.

Not once has it failed, no matter how the AI managers or I position the defense or what the player ratings are.

Like others here, I have always seen a failure rate of somewhere between 20% to 30% for sacrifice bunts in past versions of OOTP, as long as the ball is eventually bunted into play. But this is my first saved game with OOTP 23, and the results now represent a 100% total success rate over 90 games.

Out of curiosity, are you just ignoring the data posted by five other people that ALL contradict yours? Either you have a small sample size issue, or there is an issue with your settings/rules/etc, since you are the only one that seems to have sac bunts working 100% of the time.

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by MathBandit

Out of curiosity, are you just ignoring the data posted by five other people that ALL contradict yours?

No. If you had read the last sentence of the reply you just quoted, you would have seen that I addressed their results specifically and mentioned that those are the results I've always seen in the past. But I am not seeing those results in my current sim, and I believe I may have just discovered why. I will post my discovery in another message below.

[Charlie Hough]

I believe I may have found the reason why this is happening, and it appears to have nothing to do with sample size or the historical settings I've chosen. I'm using the same settings that I've used for many historical sims across 20 years of playing OOTP. The only difference is that I'm using historical minors, which should not affect how statistical output is resolved.

For some reason, my 1979 saved game calculated a modifier of 5.556 for sacrifice bunts in the Stats & AI settings. That is remarkably extreme!

I don't see any such modifier in the total_modifiers, total-modifiers_neutralized, and other files in the default database. Maybe it comes from some other file, but I'm not sure of its origin.

UPDATE: It looks like there may be a major problem with OOTP creating modifiers for historical seasons. I've checked five saved game files for 1979, including three that I had already created along with two new saves. When creating a new save, everything seems fine at first. But when I click the Continue button to proceed with the season, the game then calculates stats settings and modifiers, and it changes the initial settings and creates different numbers in different saves!

For example, in the save I've been using, the sacrifice bunts number is 5.556. In two others, including one that I just created, it's 2.798 and 3.296. Those are all pretty extreme numbers, but what's strange is that they don't match, even though I used the same settings when I created each save. I used the historical game option with 1-year recalc from the main menu, chose neutralized stats and the same historical, stats and ratings settings each time, and then I went into advanced mode and double-checked everything and made sure that the right settings were still in place.

In the latest test, after these strange numbers were calculated, I chose 1979 from the league totals year, and then OOTP recalculated everything again. It created another different set of numbers, this time with sac bunts at 1.323! This is going straight to a support ticket.

[Pelican]

Good job tracking down the apparent glitch. In my one save in 23 that has moved to a new season, I did notice a similar outlier, which I simply dialed back. No idea why that happened.