The sacrifice bunt and intentional walk are vanishing from baseball

Last February, I posted this article indicating that I thought that with the universal DH coming to MLB in 2022, the use of strategies like the sacrifice bunt and intentional walk would begin to disappear from baseball. A followup article in April seemed to confirm that hypothesis.

Now, we have a full season’s worth of data that shows that indeed, these two parts of baseball are falling out of favor with managers. First, let’s look at the sac bunt. Here are the numbers of sac bunts across all of MLB since 2010 (except for the shortened 2020 season):

Even before 2022, the use of the sacrifice had begun to decline.