A question was recently posted about Dunn’s propensity to hit sacrifice flies. After all, somebody with Dunn’s power should be able to drive the ball deep when the need arises. Yet Dunn has just one sacrifice fly this season. Is this simply a matter of having few opportunities or not being able to adapt to the situation?
I took the same group of 20 sluggers and looked at their sacrifice fly opportunities. I defined those opportunities as plate appearances with a runner on third and fewer than two outs resulting in neither a hit, a walk or a hit batsman.
Player SF Opp SF% BB BB% SO SO% Avg -------------------------------------------------- C. Lee 5 12 42% 3 12% 6 23% .611 M. Ensberg 4 11 36% 4 21% 1 5% .364 A. Soriano 3 10 30% 1 7% 4 27% .364 M. Ramirez 5 18 28% 3 10% 5 17% .409 G. Sheffield 4 15 27% 8 30% 2 7% .267 -------------------------------------------------- A. Jones 5 20 25% 6 21% 4 14% .118 D. Ortiz 5 21 24% 0 0% 4 13% .333 P. Burrell 4 17 24% 3 13% 4 17% .235 D. Lee 5 22 23% 4 12% 5 15% .292 A. Pujols 2 12 17% 4 19% 3 14% .333 -------------------------------------------------- T. Glaus 3 18 17% 4 17% 8 35% .063 K. Griffey 3 18 17% 1 4% 7 29% .211 R. Sexson 2 13 15% 3 14% 7 32% .313 M. Tejada 3 22 14% 2 6% 5 16% .296 A. Dunn 1 10 10% 7 41% 5 28% .000 -------------------------------------------------- A. Rodriguez 1 11 9% 3 16% 6 30% .333 P. Konerko 1 13 8% 3 13% 4 17% .368 C. Floyd 1 14 7% 0 0% 7 41% .133 M. Teixeira 0 9 0% 1 6% 3 19% .400 A. Ramirez 0 10 0% 2 11% 3 16% .412 -------------------------------------------------- Average 19% 13% 20% .301
Dunn has had the second-fewest opportunities of anyone on the list, and the sample sizes are so small that the data probably has too much noise to suggest much. Anyway, Dunn’s one sacrifice fly in 10 opportunities is not the worst result, but certainly not the best, either.
I threw in walks percentage, strikeout percentage and batting average into the table as well. Dunn has gone hitless in nine at-bats, not pretty, but not statistically significant, either.
He is also on the high side in walks and strikeouts, too. No surprise there, although, for the umpteenth time, the opportunities are too few to present a reliable pattern.
In his career, Dunn has eight sacrifice flies in 77 opportunties, or 10 percent. If you assume that the group average of 19 percent above represents a typical figure for power hitters (not necessarily a sound assumption), then Dunn is below par.
Taking a player above with a bit of track record, Manny Ramirez, the career results (at least for as many seasons as the data is available) are 22 sacrifice flies in 137 opportunities, or 16 percent. By comparison, Jeff Bagwell has 29 sacrifice flies in 121 opportunities, 24 percent. (Clearly many seasons are missing, though, as Bagwell has 101 career sacrifice flies.)
Here is Dunn’s career breakdown with a runner on third and fewer than two outs:
PA 1B 2B 3B HR UBB IBB HBP SO GIDP Out SF ------------------------------------------------------ 137 8 8 1 7 22 11 3 35 3 31 8 6% 6% 1% 5% 16% 8% 2% 26% 6% 23% 6%
Those numbers translate into a .258 batting average, .438 OBP and .591 slugging percentage. If you also consider the sacrifice flies to be successes, then he does something successful (reach base or drive in the runner on third) in that situation almost half the time (49.6 percent).
OK, enough minutiae for now. The bottom line is that while Dunn does not appear to be great at getting the sacrifice fly, he is not notably abysmal either.