Excerpt: "Sacrifice Bunts in the Time of No Singles"

"One-run strategies like the straight sacrifice and the steal are built around the idea that second base and third base are scoring position and first base is not. In our modern minimum-single environment, that premise no longer holds. Among successful hits, singles are still more likely than extra-base hits, but about twice as likely, as opposed to three times as likely for much of baseball history and four times as likely when these strategies were invented. Home runs and extra-base hits make up such a large percentage of safe hits that it's a waste to burn an out to move a runner up anticipating a single."