The other day I was asked a question in preparation for my appearance on a radio show that didn’t come up in the interview: have stolen bases and bunting become a lost art?

Stolen bases are down over the last few years, there are still over 3000 attempts, so it’s not like they are going away. Teams understand the trade-offs of the base for the outs, so I’m not surprised they happen less frequently.

The same is true of sacrifice bunts. You seldom see a first inning sacrifice any more. Teams understand that the sacrifice bunt is most effective in the late innings of close games.

What we appear to have lost is the player who makes his living reaching base via the bunt. Phil Rizzuto posted a career .351 OBP by drawing a good number of walks and picking up lots of hits via the bunt. In my lifetime, Brett Butler was the master of the infield hit, many times executing drag bunts to reach first. (Note that Ichiro Suzuki accomplished this with Baltimore chops.) I remember ESPN interviewing Butler about bunting, and he said he would teach anyone to bunt who wanted to learn, and Butler felt it was an under used weapon. After all, Mickey Mantle used to bunt for hits.

What I think happened has a lot to do with the difference between Rizzuto, Butler, and Dustin Pedroia. Rizzuto is listed at Baseball Reference as five too six inches, 150 pounds. He was small. Butler was taller, but very skinny, five foot ten inches, 160 pounds. Neither of these players beefy muscular players. They needed to use speed and bat control (the bunt) to reach base. Dustin Pedroia is listed as five feet, eight or nine inches depending on where you look, but most people think his height is exaggerated. His weight, however, is listed at 175 pounds. That extra weight is muscle.

One of the things that led to the steroid era in baseball was the busting of the myth that too much weight lifting hurt players. They were afraid they would be muscle bound. It turns out, the more muscle, the better the athlete. (All the lifting led to the steroid use, that enhanced the lifting.) So now even the small players are ripped.

So small players today are not as small, and they have other, better tools for generating offense. Note that Pedroia hit more home runs than Butler and Rizzuto combined, and hit more doubles in his 10+ year career than either had in their longer careers. The bunt for a hit is becoming a lost art because small players can reach base in more damaging ways.