If you check the record book, you’ll find that the Cubs once sacrifice bunted against the Cardinals in a game four times, and not one was the pitcher. And you don’t have to go back to the 1920s to find it — it happened Monday night.

One of these bunt-happy Cub attempts in particular raised the eyebrow of at least one fan, reader “Brandon.” In the eighth inning of a tie game, the Cubs’ third-place — and presumably best — hitter, Starlin Castro, tried to lay one down with runners on first and second and none out. In a play that Keith Hernandez would’ve been proud of, Lance Berkman pounced on the ball and began a beautiful 3-5-4 DP.

Though we are often skeptical of the utility of sacrifice bunting, the issue for both Brandon and us was as much whether a team should ever have its best hitter sacrificing as it is whether to bunt, period. We’re talking about a career .344 OBP hitter in Castro.

We ran the scenarios using the 2nd Guesser app, and the results surprised us. Based on a 73% chance of successfully bunting and Castro’s career OBP, sac bunting in that game situation was actually a good idea (win expectancy declines more if you hit away than if you bunt). Actually, bunting would’ve been a smart call for just about anyone on either team: At that bunting success rate, the break-even OBP point is roughly .440 (Berkman boasts the highest career OBP of anyone in Monday’s game at .409).

The catch, however, is in that bunting success rate, which the Guesser assumes to be 73% (which was the league average last year). It just so happens that, despite his considerable other baseball talents, Starlin Castro isn’t very adept at sacrifice bunting, successful at a below-average 57% rate. Plugging in that number yields a very different outcome: Instead of bunting being the wise move, it now becomes a wash (Net WE for hitting away is around 14, as is bunting). For the record, Big Puma has a 100% sac-bunt success rate — on one attempt.

Of course, the rest of the context is necessary to the overall calculation, too. Following Castro was LaHair, who, as Brandon notes, would’ve almost surely been walked intentionally. That would’ve brought up Alfonso Soriano, not a bad bet for a strikeout or inning-ending GIDP. It’s all academic at this point, of course.

Beyond strategy, we wondered just how often a team’s best hitter — or at least the hitter that the manager believes to be its best by batting him third in the lineup — sacrifices. Berkman, for example, has had a plurality of plate appearances batting third and has attempted it but once in 7462 PAs. So far this season, a #3 hitter has successfully sacrificed only twice (Josh Reddick and Jimmy Rollins), and it happened only 19 times last year. Most of the list includes players who are established bunters (Placido Polanco, 75%, Freddy Sanchez, 76%) or poor-OBP men (Jason Bourgeois, Xavier Paul) or both (Omar Infante, 68%/.319). One might note that in 16 of the 19 successful sacrifices, the play was a negative WPA.

And in case you’re wondering, that legendary third-place hitter Hernandez had a 67% success rate* sacrifice bunting to go with his .384 career OBP.

*Full disclosure: MLB average during Mex’s career was 78%.

Tonight’s starter, Jake Westbrook, has been enjoying a career year so far, posting bests in FIP (2.79) and xFIP (3.20). He has been getting the job done by inducing groundballs (a career-high 62.8% rate) and getting a bit lucky (better than normal strand rate and home-run rate per flyball rate). In the second of the two-game set, Kyle Lohse takes the ball, hoping to recover from a pair of so-so outings in which he struck out only three each time and fell prey to the vagaries of line-drives hit into play. Even with those starts, Lohse has been a reliable back-end starter, with a 3.33 FIP and 4.10 xFIP.

On the batting side, Lance Berkman has returned from the DL just in time to face Ryan Dempster, off whom he feasts (a .423 OBP and .581 SLG in 78 PAs). He may get a rest against Paul Maholm, with the recently activated right-hander Allen Craig, who has five home runs in 46 plate appearance, a team-high 10.9% home-run rate. Speaking of home runs, Carlos Beltran leads the league in circuit clouts with 13, hitting eight over his last 11 games … The Cardinals released lefty JC Romero and recalled righty Eduardo Sanchez. That leaves the staff with only one LOOGy, Marc Rzepczynski, who is less a one-out guy than a multiple-batter reliever. The Cubs have five lefthanded hitters on their roster, so Mike Matheny will need to be judicious. He might deploy against lefties Sanchez, who has a career 2.94 FIP against them … Neither the Giants nor the Cardinals have retired Frankie Frisch’s #3. The Hall-of-Fame Frisch ranks 50th on the career WAR list among batters, higher than all hitter retirees except Stan Musial. The Fordham Flash won a title and an MVP award with the team. Here’s hoping he’s next … Speaking of retired numbers, the Cardinals’ web site does not yet list their latest, Tony La Russa.

If you say Lance Lynn lost his first game, to quote Jeannie Bueller, you lose a testicle:

• Rafael Furcal led off two more innings by getting on base. He now has a .503 OBP when leading off an inning. The Cardinals are second in the league in runs scored. The two statistics are not coincidental.
• Despite the walks and the outcome, Sunday’s game was far from Lynn’s worst start of the year:
  

  Date	Opp	TBF	HR	SO	BB	FIP
  2-May	PIT	24	0	6	1	1.63
  14-Apr	CHC	22	0	5	2	2.23
  7-May	@ARI	21	0	7	4	2.58
  13-May	ATL	25	0	7	3	2.65
  8-Apr	@MIL	22	1	8	1	2.98
  25-Apr	@CHC	30	1	7	2	3.61
  20-Apr	@PIT	23	1	4	1	4.13

• The Cardinals started out fabulously but quickly fizzled. In the bottom of the first, they put runners on second and third with no out (and Carlos Beltran batting) — a run expectancy of 1.571 runs. Instead, they scored zero. That’s because, after two consecutive walks, Cardinal batters struck out three consecutive times. At least they didn’t hit into a double play, right?
• Tony Cruz allowed a passed ball in Sunday’s game, bringing the catchers’ total to four on the year. It doesn’t seem like much, but the Cardinal backstops’ rate of missed pitches (wild pitches and passed balls) is one every 191 pitches. That may not sound like much, but compared to last year, when they missed one every 398 pitches, it’s twice as often. Of course, it may even out over the course of the year.
• John Rooney noted that the Braves scored their runs “all with two out,” but what does that phrase mean? And why don’t we ever hear “all with one out”?
• Good to see Puma prowling the diamond again.
• The weekend’s matchup of the league’s two best teams ended in a decisive win for the Braves. They’re clearly the better team — at the moment.
• In the eighth inning of a 7-1 game, Chipper just watched ball four on four pitches like it was intentional. We’re not sure what has happened to Kyle McClellan, but it makes us sad.
• We won’t gainsay the decision to retire Tony La Russa’s number, though we will note that we think that the team has at least one other number that deserved  to be retired first (hint: It’s currently in use on the team and belonged to a player who has more career WAR than Red Schoendienst and Enos Slaughter).

On the night on which the Cardinals retired Tony La Russa’s old number 10, his successor honored the former skipper by being his own man.

To be sure, Mike Matheny channeled TLR on a couple of conventional moves, such as sacrificing in a tie game in the ninth and tenth innings. But those were also the right decisions.

Among the anti-La Russian calls that Matheny made:

• Started the lefthanded Matt Carpenter at third base vs. a southpaw when a righty (David Freese) was available.
• Left Skip Schumacher in to play second base late in the game after pinch hitting. In the TLR era, it most often worked the opposite way, with Schumaker giving way to the defensively preferred Tyler Greene or Dan Descalso.
• Brought Jason Motte into a tie game in the ninth inning. What’s more, he did it when the opposing lineup called for a LOOGy, which he had in the bullpen.
• Left Motte in to pitch a second inning when he had other relievers available.

Not all of Matheny’s calls were wise. He decided to leave LOOGy Marc Rzepczynski in to face the righthanded bopper Dan Uggla, who hit a go-ahead home run in the seventh (in addition to La Russa’s number, we should also retire the term LOOGy, since it’s no longer applicable these days). And he ordered an intentional walk to Michael Bourn with a runner on second and a tie game (that led to a bases-loaded walk to give the Braves a lead in the eighth). In what turned out to be a fatal decision, Matheny opted to let second-tier reliever Kyle McClellan pitch a second inning and face Chipper Jones and Jason Heyward, who had four walks and a home run between them in six plate appearances against K-Mac, in the 11th. No matter how bad JC Romero is, La Russa would’ve almost certainly called him in.

But winning or losing move, it’s becoming clear that Matheny is staking out his own unique claim on the game, at least as much as a new manager working for a fairly conservative organization could hope to. Let’s face it, the cardinals weren’t going to hire a revolutionary, so Matheny’s individualism is noteworthy.