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Last month, Ben Clemens declared 2026 to be The Year of the Bunt. “Bunts are making a comeback,” he wrote, and then he backed that contention up with numbers and graphs and such, because while the FanGraphs style guide doesn’t have a hard target for words per article, we’re generally expected to use more than five. Ben was right, of course. That’s what the graphs and the words were for. Bunts have gone from 0.7% of plate appearances in 2025 to 0.9% in 2026. We’re talking about very small numbers here, but that’s still a year-over-year increase of nearly 23%.

Not only are teams bunting more often, but they’re also bunting in optimal situations and laying them down more successfully. This year’s bunts have a .533 batting average, compared to .468 last year. Unsuccessful bunts, which result in neither a hit nor a sacrifice, are down from 22% to 19%. According to Baseball Savant’s Run Values, last year’s bunts were worth 13 runs. This season’s bunts are already at 50 runs, and we’ve still got a couple months left! Over the winter, the whole league seems to have finally figured how and when to bunt. But not the Detroit Tigers.

The Tigers have laid down eight bunts this year. Eight. That works out to just under one bunt every 12.5 games. In this article, I will show you all eight of them. It will not take long. The Tigers have more triples than bunts. The Rays have bunted 10 times more than the Tigers. Every team except the Phillies has bunted at least twice as often as the Tigers. Twenty different individual players have bunted more than the Tigers. The Tigers recognize The Year of the Bunt as a fad, and they want no part of such ephemeral frivolities. They didn’t attempt to bunt for the first time until May 4, their 36th game of the season. It, uh, did not go well.

That’s Zack Short popping out to the first baseman in front of approximately eight fans on a rainy Star Wars Day in Detroit. After waiting for more than a month, that’s what happened when the Tigers finally bunted.

The Tigers aren’t bunting infrequently enough to set a record, though they’re not that far off the pace. No team has ever gone an entire season without bunting. Even in the short 2020 season, every team bunted at least three times. I can only get total bunt data going back to 2015, bunt hit data going back to 2002, and sacrifice bunt data going back to 1895, but I feel confident declaring that the full-season record for fewest bunts belongs to the 2022 Braves, who bunted just six times. Second place belongs to the 2023 Braves, who bunted seven times.

Those are the only teams in the Statcast Era – and, almost certainly, in AL/NL history – to have fewer bunts than the Tigers have right now, and that makes all the sense in the world. Those Braves teams could mash. The 2023 Braves were battling it out with the Murderer’s Row Yankees for the best offense in baseball history, and indeed, they finished with a 126 wRC+, one point above Ruth, Gehrig, and their homicidal accomplices. Why on Earth would you bunt when you can hit like that? The Braves were also the one team that only bunted three times in 2020. So why is this article about the Tigers and not the Braves?

We’ll answer that question in a moment, but more importantly, after his first bunt blew up in his face so spectacularly, what in the world made Zack Short think he should try it again just four days later? Maybe he figured it couldn’t go as badly as it did the last time. He figured wrong. Even on May the Eighth, the Fourth was not with him. No wonder the Tigers haven’t bunted much since.

Honestly, it’s almost impressive to pop up a bunt to such a terrible spot that two different opponents are within range to catch it. I mean, I suppose this could have worked out for Short. If the pitcher and catcher had bonked into each other just a little harder, maybe they would’ve knocked each other unconscious and Short could’ve scampered around the bases for the rare inside-the-infield home run while the rest of the Royals attempted to pry the ball from beneath their limp bodies. Here’s a tip for any aspiring bunters out there: If you end up looking like this once you’ve bunted the ball, you have not done a good job.

That’s not what it looks like when things have gone right for you. In possibly related news, Zack Short is no longer with the Tigers.

The answer to that first question is that the Tigers have come for the Braves’ crown. They finished at the bottom of the league with 14 bunts in 2024 and 10 bunts in 2025. They’re on pace for 13 this year. In addition to tracking bunts, Baseball Savant also tracks foul and missed bunts. The Tigers finished last in that category last year and they’re tied for last this season. They are three years into their reign as the anti-bunting kings of baseball, and they’re not changing their stripes no matter what it’s the year of.

More importantly, the Tigers are on pace to tie a record that, at least according to the mathematical system with which I’m most familiar, can only ever be tied. The Tigers have zero bunt hits. Now, as I mentioned earlier, we only have bunt hit data going back to 2002, but I can assure you of this: Even before 2002, no team ever finished with a negative number of bunt hits. So the Tigers have the chance for a piece of a very round record. According to our database, should the Tigers maintain this breakneck pace, they would share the record with the 2020 Angels and White Sox, who don’t count because they played only 60 games, and the 2018 A’s, who do count. The A’s somehow made it 162 games, or 6,255 plate appearances without a bunt hit. At least our database thinks so. It’s got a nice, round zero in the BUH column. But I went and watched the 18 bunts the A’s laid down in 2018. Our database is wrong.

That’s Jed Lowrie beating the shift with a push bunt on August 24. The A’s had one bunt hit in 2018. The Tigers have a chance at keeping this record all to themselves (unless you count the 2020 season, in which case they’d share it with the Angels and the White Sox, but that’s no fun for anyone).

After Short’s disastrous pair of popups, the Tigers waited three weeks before their next bunt attempts. They came in a flurry, though. Here’s Zach McKinstry laying down successful sacrifices on May 29 and June 1, and Jake Rogers doing the same on June 3. That’s right, of the Tigers’ eight bunts this season, five have been laid down either a Zach or a Zack. If they trade for Zac Veen and get him to lay down a bunt this season, I pledge to fly to Detroit and award the team a homemade trophy topped by an anthropomorphic Z bunting a baseball. Please be warned that if fundamentally sound sac bunts get you or your coworkers all hot and bothered, then this next clip package is not suitable for work:

Both the runners McKinstry sacrificed over ended up scoring. Maybe that’s why he’s still a Tiger and Short isn’t. The runner Rogers bunted over scored too, but on a home run, so I’m loath to give him too much credit for that.

Why aren’t the Tigers bunting? It’s probably not because they’re slow. Their team sprint speed of 27.5 feet per second ranks 11th in baseball, and their baserunning grades out right around the middle of the pack. However, despite that respectable standing, they don’t have any burners. They don’t have a single player with a sprint speed of 29 feet per second or higher, which is generally viewed as the cutoff for elite speed. At 28.3, Matt Vierling is the team’s fastest everyday player, but that still makes him below average for a center fielder. I don’t think that’s just a quirk of the roster. The Tigers as an organization don’t seem to prioritize speed, or the avenues through which it can help a team. Not only are they the league’s least frequent bunters for three years running, but they finished last in stolen bases in 2025 and they’re last again this year.

The Tigers are built to slug. To be clear, they’re not slugging that much right now. They’re not the 2023 Braves or the Murderer’s Row Yankees. In fact, with a wRC+ of 98, Detroit’s offense is almost perfectly average. But the Tigers are designed to slug. For the past few years, their lineup has been defined by big corner infield/outfield types like Riley Greene, Spencer Torkelson, and Kerry Carpenter. They’ve got the highest fly ball rate in baseball. They don’t have the personnel to bunt or to run, and that seems to be a deliberate choice.

Here’s the closest the Tigers have come to a bunt hit all season. It’s very, very close, and you know that because the umpire spreads his arms real wide, and Hao-Yu Lee leaps up and pumps his fist with excitement, and Jason Benetti screams, “He is safe!” Anyway, it got overturned on appeal. He is out.

Now, if we’re being honest with ourselves, that didn’t necessarily deserve to be a base hit. It was a sacrifice all the way. Lee squared early and bunted the ball with authority. He did bust it out of the box, but the only reason he came so close to earning a base hit was that Paul Goldschmidt forgot that being the first baseman occasionally involves covering first base. Anyway, the Tigers came this close to making me find something else to write about today.

Perhaps emboldened by that near-success, the Tigers bunted again less than a week later. Earlier this year, I wrote that the conventional wisdom about how to pitch to a bunter is flawed. The conventional wisdom says to bust the batter with four-seam fastballs up and in, which are very uncomfortable to bunt and can result in catastrophic bunt popups that sometimes turn into double plays. I ran the numbers and found that, although up-and-in fastballs result in more popups, they’re still much easier to bunt than breaking balls and offspeed pitches. The thing about popped up bunts, though, is that they stick in your mind. I expect that throwing up-and-in fastballs to bunters will continue because of plays like this one.

Not only did Vierling pop this ball up, but he floated it 69 catchable feet into the infield. That’s a disastrously long distance for a bunt to travel. The average bunt travels just 12 feet in the air! The first baseman could have caught it easily, but fearful of pulling a Goldschmidt, he stayed put next to the bag. With the second baseman playing deep and up the middle, the ball looked for a moment like it might have found a nice, cozy Bermuda Triangle to get lost in, but pitcher Bryan Abreu made the play look downright easy. His breezy toss beat the Tigers’ fastest everyday player to the bag by a step.

Here’s the Tigers’ final bunt of the season. It’s a safety squeeze by McKinstry, and it came against the Phillies 12 days ago. It wasn’t just a successful squeeze. Pitcher Tim Mayza threw the ball into right field, so McKinstry reached safely and the runner on first made it all the way to third base. They once again had one out and runners on the corners. They could and should have gotten into Mayza’s head by bunting again with the next batter.

I have watched this clip from every available angle. I have watched it in full speed and in slow motion, and I have clicked through it one frame at a time. For about half an hour there, I was convinced that McKinstry deserved a hit. I was absolutely certain that he’d stepped on first base before the ball hit the second baseman’s glove, in which case this shouldn’t have gone down as a throwing error. It should have just been a base hit because McKinstry beat out the throw fair and square. “The Tigers deserve one bunt hit!” I was prepared to scream. I was prepared to petition the league office for a correction, because I stand on the side of justice, even when it undercuts the premise of an article. But I was wrong. Mayza’s throw beat McKinstry to the bag by a good foot. The ball clanked off the glove before McKinstry’s foot touched the bag.

So the Tigers have zero bunt hits, which is exactly how many bunt hits they deserve. If they can make it through the rest of the regular season without a bunt hit, they’ll tie the 2020 Angels and White Sox. Even if they do manage one bunt hit, they’ll still share the full-season record with the 2018 A’s. With more than two months left in the season, they are all but certain to end up with the fewest bunts in the league for the third year in a row.