What's with the Bunts Already?

I went on a bit of a diatribe in my last post about sacrifices and how useless they generally are in most game situations.

The Cubs have won two of their last three games since that post.  One, the final in the Brewers series, was pretty much of a blowout.  The other two were tighter games in which managerial strategy played a bigger role.

On Monday night against the Cardinals, Sveum had the Cubs bunting away and, as usual, bad things happened even though the Cubs eventually posted single runs in each inning to put away the game.

In the eighth inning, DeJesus led off with a single.  Campana beat out a sacrifice attempt to put runners at first and second.  Sveum promptly had his #3 hitter Castro bunt into a double play.  Now not only did this strategy result in failure, but it made no sense at all.  Had Castro succeeded, there would have been men at second and third and the Cardinals would have walked Bryan LaHair intentionally.  Which they did anyway.  The Cubs got lucky when Alfonso Soriano managed to single home the lead run.

Not satisfied with the strategy's potentially harmful results in the eighth inning, Sveum went back to the well in the ninth.  Soto led off by getting hit by a pitch.  Barney then attempted a sacrifice bunt and got lucky when the Cards pitcher messed up the throw.  So Mather comes up and also bunts into another potential double play that Freese messes up by throwing wildly to first, plating an insurance run.

The point is that in the late innings, Sveum just seems to be on automatic pilot and his strategy makes no sense whatsoever.  On Tuesday, Sveum went to the lifer playbook, choosing to pitch to Yadier Molina with a runner in scoring position and first base open in a tie game.  Presumably this was because a left-handed hitter, Carpenter was on deck.  OK, Carpenter hit a homer in his previous at-bat, incidentally off a left-handed pitcher, James Russell.  But he is a rookie.  Molina, on the other hand, is probably one of the best clutch hitters in all of baseball.  So naturally the Cubs lose.

I don't mean to pick on Sveum exclusively here, but I had rather expected more from Epstein and co. in choosing him.  They know very well that bunts don't make any sense most of the time.  The Red Sox bunted only 22 times last year, 19 the year before.  The last time they bunted more than 30 times was 2000.  In the championship season of 2004, they had only 12 sacrifice bunts, two by pitchers in inter-league games.

So you have got to wonder what's going on here, and when it is going to change.