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Why MLB’s moneyballers aim to resurrect the game’s trickiest pitch

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This week the Tampa Bay Rays buried the Yankees’ season.

Along the way they may have resurrected the bunt.

The bunt is classic inside baseball: The batter lightly taps the ball instead of trying to whack it out of the park.

Its several varieties — drag, sacrifice, suicide squeeze — once took up a chapter in every team’s playbook.

Then came sabermetrics, and math whizzes crunched the numbers.

They declared the bunt a waste of a perfectly good plate appearance.

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Maybe the math guys overcorrected.

This year the Rays, a small-market franchise that can’t spend lavishly on power hitters, bunted 134 times — more than any team in a decade — en route to the best record in the American League.

“It’s about continuing to understand what influences winning,” Rays front-office man Erik Neander explained: Bunts have become so rare in the “Moneyball” age that opposing fielders don’t know how to handle them.

Given the Rays’ success with an old-school tactic, what’s on deck as baseball’s next........

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