After thinking about it i think its the Hit in Run. To start with you can have your batter swinging at the the worst pitch of a players at bat. If you dont make contact you can end up with a strike and the runner being throw out. If you do make contact there a huge chance that you can hit a line drive or pop up and get the runner doubled up. It seem to me that the time it is successful to get the runner to 3rd base is not worth it for all the times you fail trying to get it done.
I guess it goes without saying but, it depends on if it works or not as to if its the worst play in baseball. Kinda like an onside kick to start a football game. Youre called a genious and gutsy if it works. Called a .....well. If it doesnt work. It really depends on how you use it too. I would only call it on a hitters count and only look to get a easy steal to second as a result, with anything after that as a bonus. (getting 3rd or scoring a run.) The only time I'm looking to get to 3rd is in desperation time. If you will just play it as a full out steal with the batter swinging on a hitters count, it wont eat at you as bad when it fails. LoL. (get doubled up.) I would like to see some percentages on getting 2nd on a steal, as compared to the hit and run working. Im sure the stealing base percentage is a lot more than the hit & run. With that being said. Ive never called the hit and run in all my years of coaching. I just dont trust it. Double steal would have to be right up there with the hit and run too.
Run and hit is a much better option, IMO.
As for the worst play, Bunting to move people over early in the game, with players that have a good OBP, is statistically a terrible move. Outs are a valuable resource and giving one away early significantly lowers the chance of scoring and scoring more than one run in that inning. Actually it slightly decreases the chance of scoring one run (-2%). The only time this should be used is when it is late in a game and a team NEEDS ONE run.
Quote:The best way to score runs, at any level of baseball, is to avoid making outs. That may be counterintuitive at first blush ("But hits score runs!"), but the idea is sound: if you keep not making outs, innings will continue until players have to cross the plate.
There's lots of fairly technical stuff done by sabermetric experts on run expectancy, which is, briefly, the number of runs that will score, on average, from a given game state (like, say, runners on first and second with two outs). Run expectancy can also be expressed as a percentage chance that a run will score at some point in the inning.
There's a run expectancy matrix here, compiled by examining literally every game state in Major League Baseball for about 60 years. (For the purposes of this article, we'll use the 1993-2010 numbers.) You will notice, looking at that chart, that the thing that generally hurts the chances of scoring a run the most is making an out.
That's not surprising, right? Making outs is bad. But trading an out for a base is a particularly great way to decrease run expectancy: sacrifice bunting a runner to second with no outs decreases run expectancy by .22 runs, from .941 to .721, and decreases the chance of a run scoring from 44.1% to 41.8%. Doing the same to move a runner from second to third and make the first out of an inning reduces run expectancy from 1.170 to .989, and while it increases the chance one run will score in the inning, that bump, from 63.7% to 67.4%, isn't exactly huge. (It's also worth noting here that run expectancy is only observed from the first to eighth inning; in ninth innings and extras innings, when teams often bunt more to push just one run across, things change.)
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[Image: Average_Runs_Scored_medium.JPG]
[Image: Chance_of_Scoring_medium.JPG]
Now, things are all relative. If it is a struggling batter that can handle the bat well and force the defense to make a play, that is one thing. Because bunts can put pressure on the defense by simply PUTTING THE BALL IN PLAY. But if you have a batter early in the game with a low strike out or fly ball rate, let them swing away. Your odds of scoring multiple runs increases significantly. But like I said, it is all relative and the science won't be applicable for all teams in all situations. Such as a team that is struggling at the plate, where a game full of bunts may help bring their eyes back and bring some life into the lineup. But, just going on average, normal scenarios, this is one of the worst plays in baseball.
the balk move. illegal but rarely gets called.