Bunting is the strangest skill in baseball: coaches ask for it in close games, hitters practice it never, and everybody acts surprised when it fails. We were as guilty as anyone until a tournament where my son struck out trying to bunt twice in one weekend, and I realized he had literally never practiced it.
The reason is obvious once you say it out loud. Bunting practice normally needs someone throwing, and nobody wants to throw batting practice to a kid who's going to bunt everything back to them. So it doesn't happen.
The Net Workaround
A net fixes the partner problem completely. You can bunt off a tee or from front toss, at full volume, alone, in your own backyard. It's not a perfect simulation — you don't see game-speed pitching — but the mechanics of bunting have nothing to do with pitch speed. They're about hand position, bat angle, and knees.
Two things your net does not do: it won't tell you if a bunt would have stayed fair, and it won't field the ball. Both are solvable with tape and discipline, which we'll get to.
Drill One: Direction Bunting
Tape two vertical lines on the net, one on the left third and one on the right third. Ten bunts to each side. This is the drill that teaches bat angle — the difference between pushing the ball toward first and deadening it toward third is a wrist angle of maybe ten degrees, and you can feel it immediately when you have a target.
Drill Two: The Dead Bunt
Set the tee three feet from the net and try to bunt the ball so it drops nearly straight down rather than bouncing off. This is the hardest one and the most valuable, because a hard bunt is worse than no bunt: it's a double play waiting to happen. Getting the ball to die takes a soft grip at contact, and the net gives you instant feedback on whether you caught it or pushed it.
Drill Three: Bunt Then Swing
Half the value of bunting in a game is the threat. Show bunt, pull it back, swing away. Alternate five bunts and five swings off the same setup, without changing your stance between them. The drill isn't about the bunt at all — it's about keeping your hands in a position where either option is still available, which is exactly what makes a bunt threat useful.
The Fundamentals That Actually Matter
- Bat up, not flat. The bat starts at the top of the strike zone and your knees do the moving, not your arms.
- Bend the knees, not the waist. Bending at the waist drops your eyes and makes you lose the ball.
- Hold the bat like an egg, not a hammer. A tight grip turns a bunt into a line drive.
- Watch the ball hit the bat. Sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it under pressure.
- Get out of the box. A good bunt is worth nothing if you're standing still watching it.
How We Set It Up
Everything runs into the net, off a tee or front toss. Our $59.99 7x7ft net with the carry bag is the one that travels, because it sets up in about ninety seconds and bunting practice is the kind of thing we do at the park when a field is free. At home, the $55.55 nine-hole pitching net is on the other side of the yard for whoever's throwing that day, so one setup covers a hitter working on bunts and a pitcher working on location.
One addition that made a real difference: a couple of stakes or cones in the grass at the front of the plate area, so we can see whether a bunt would have rolled fair or foul. Ten seconds of setup, and now the drill has a real outcome instead of just a contact sound.
What It Fixed
Twenty minutes a week for a winter. By spring he could put a bunt down either line on demand, and the bunt-then-swing drill turned the threat into something real — pitchers started noticing, which meant better pitches to hit in the counts where he needed them.
It's the least glamorous practice we do, and it won us more games than any batting drill in the book.