[SteveP]

First the bad news: I’ve found it impossible to get bunting as a whole to work in OOTP in a way that comes at all close to authentic gameplay in my 1960s based league, no matter what I did with options and settings. OOTP appears to handle bunting even less well than pinch-hitting. The good news is that it’s possible to make some noticeable improvements to sac bunting.

OOTP appears to have a systemic problem with bunt ratings for historical players, at least in this era. Either that or the game engine uses these ratings badly. I plan to try some experiments with rating adjustments, to see what I can learn. For one thing, the AI never calls bunt-for-hit plays in my test league. This can’t be fixed with any of the settings. The AI also never calls squeeze plays, which may or may not be ratings related.

The most important problem with sac bunting is that pitchers SH too often, and position players not nearly enough. In 1960, pitchers accounted for less than 40% of all SH plays. With default settings in OOTP, the proportion is around 90%. This is not only unhistorical, but makes the game too predictable and too boring. IRL, almost every position player executed a sac bunt at some time during the season.

Other SH related problems: the AI sac bunts too often with a runner on second, one out; the AI sac bunts with runners on 1st & 3rd (which happens IRL only as a squeeze play); and the AI sac bunts with two strikes too often.

The settings that I ended up using do help get SH closer to authentic gameplay, however, they need to be tested for other eras.

First, I set the League strategy option for bunting to “Very Often”. This increases the proportion of SH plays by position players significantly -- much closer to historical levels. Doing this requires that overall SH plays be reduced substantially. The only way this can be done effectively is in the League Totals Modifier for sac bunts. For my test league, the best setting seems to be about 25% of normal (i.e., .250 if the normal setting would otherwise be 1.000), but I think that may still be too high.

With these adjustments, you can use normal settings for sac bunting in the Team strategy pages (which I like to vary from team to team). One caution: if you use my settings, you may find some instances of sac bunting by position players disconcerting, as the AI tends to be eccentric in its play calling. One thing I’ve done is to modify the team strategy pages for all teams so that sac bunting is set to “Never” when the run differential is 4+ in either direction. This adds some work to maintaining these pages, however, so I don’t know if I’m going to stick with doing that.

FWIW