Kapler, Giants’ hitters willing to show that bunting isn’t dead
Mid-afternoon Monday at Oracle Park, well before the Giants’ scheduled batting practice, some San Francisco hitters were in the batting cage, practicing their bunting.
The Giants entered Monday with 176 home runs, second in the majors to Toronto’s 178, but manager Gabe Kapler said the almost lost art of bunting will play a role for his team down the stretch.
“I’m proud that some of our veteran players are out there working” on bunting, Kapler said in his pregame news conference. “It’s not going to come up a lot, but it’s going to come up enough, and I’d really like us to be good at that, both from the sacrifice standpoint but also bunting for base hits once in a while.”
Kapler mentioned Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt and LaMonte Wade Jr. as the Giants’ top bunters.
Crawford knows it’s not all that easy to lay one down.
“It definitely takes practice,” the All-Star shortstop said. “You’re not going to be able to
just hop into a big-league game and be able to get a bunt down if you haven’t been working on it.”
The mere threat of a bunt can pay dividends for a hitter.
Kapler referenced how opponents “position their defenders against Belt. Very aggressively with their third basemen, which I like. I think it’s a really good thing when you have to defend the bunt against a quality hitter like that.”
Over the course of his decade-plus in the majors, Crawford has proin gressed from a bottomof-the-order hitter who might be asked to bunt every now and then to a middle-of-the-order hitter who entered Monday leading the Giants in homers with 19.
He discussed what goes into deciding whether to try to bunt for a base hit when the opponent is shifting against him, basically inviting him to push one down the third-base line.
“You have to understand when it’s a good time to try to get one down or when it’s a good time to try to get yourself on second or drive yourself in, you know what I mean?” Crawford said.
“If we’re down two runs and it’s late in the game and they’re shifted, you might think about it a little bit to try to get to that next guy and make him the tying run.”
Entering Monday, the only S.F. position player on the 26-man roster with more than one sacrifice this season was Wade, with two.
Still, if the opponent believes a hitter might try to bunt, that becomes an advantage to that hitter.
“What we really want is them to have that tool the bag,” Kapler said of his hitters possessing the ability to keep defenses honest. “What we really want is, over the course of time, for defenses to have to respect that we have that tool in our bag.”
Scoring change: The game-ending play from the Giants’ 8-7 win over Arizona last Tuesday has been switched from an error on first baseman Christian Walker to a single — and an RBI — for Kris Bryant.