Intentional Walks: The Scourge Of Our National Game

By taking a knee in football is taking the players out of the equation. That stinks too. But everyone seems to be okay with it.

I don’t think there’s anything that needs to be done about it, first off, but the strategy of it has been really weird in this series.

Washington walking Pujols with no one on and already ahead in the count in the 7th assured that Pujols would come up again in the 9th. Had Ogando been able to get Pujols and then Holliday or Berkman out, then he wouldn’t have been due up in the 9th.

In Game 2, it was the opposite. LaRussa did not intentionally walk anyone to set up the double play chance. It was especially weird because he preferred to take out his closer and bring in his 2nd-string LOOGY to get Hamilton rather than IBB him and set up the double play with Beltre vs. Motte.

Then the dumbest move (that didn’t matter) that I think I’ve ever seen: burning a reliever just to IBB walk somebody. If you’re LaRussa, you’re hoping the game goes into extra innings. You’ll need your relievers for that. Instead, he burns a guy he deemed worthy to be on the mound with the game on the line in Game 2 as the IBB walk guy.

It was just bad strategy.

is that (I’m betting) the majority of those 1231 plate intentional walks avoided a great player or allowed a pitcher to hit. Baseball is all about the anticipation of greatness. The ninth inning was awesome with Pujols striking out in a high leverage situation. There should be more of those types of situation with high profile players not fewer.

And I don’t necessarily see why it wouldn’t be easy to ban. The batter isn’t allowed to sit down in the batter’s box, is he? Why should the catcher be allowed to stand?

If they want to throw four balls, let them do it to a catcher in a crouch—but then you run the risk of a wild pitch, throwing a strike, etc. At least then there would be something to watch.

Intentional walks are important strategy and add to the fun of the game. I enjoy games by trying to guess the move a manager is going to make.

The true battle that should be waged is the time to play a game. Younger fans and kids don’t want to start watching something that they can’t see how it ends because they have to get some sleep. So they don’t watch at all. Just look at the commercials during the game; the advertisers know what the demo is……many ads for Viagra, etc.

The true cause of this problem to go along with more commercials, hitters working the count, pitchers not toeing the rubber quickly between pitches, (and perhaps intentional walks?) is the changing of pitchers mid-inning.

Bill James’ idea of a new rule that a relief pitcher can’t be removed mid-inning until he gives up a run would greatly speed up the game. If an injury causes a pitchers removal before he gives up a run, he must go on the disable list.

Would this take away too much strategy? No, it creates new strategy of bullpen management. Faster games would mean more fans watching, especially the younger generation not watching now now.

Your thoughts?

I hadn’t heard this idea before, but why limit it to only intentional walks? It might be interesting to see the same concept applied to any walk: On the fourth ball, the batter has the option to take his base and advance runners as usual, or “bank” the walk and start over with a fresh count. If the ball is put into play or the batter strikes out, then the result stands. However, if he manages to get another walk, it becomes a two base walk, which could again be “banked” and reset the count. Draw four walks in an AB, and jog around the bases. You’d have to be careful about doing so, though, since you’re risking losing any bases that could have been awarded.

I want the two teams out there to be trying everything to attempt to win the game. If Washington believes the best way is to walk Pujols (it worked everytime last night), this is what I want him to do. I don’t want him to pitch to him just to make things more exciting for the fans.

If we had this rule, the managers would just have the pitcher throw four balls three feet outside. Do you really want umpires to have to rule on the “intent” of the pitcher? Was he “affording the batter a fair chance to strike the orb”? Is this really a change to the game that anyone wishes to foist on us?

 is that the solution proposed is just as boring as the intentional walk to first base. They just get walked to second or third base. I realize the point is deterrence but it just sounds like it slows down the game further.

Every other sport has its own equivalent of the IBB. Football teams occasionally allow the opposing team to score in order to get the ball back with more time on the clock. Or they might take an intentional safety. In basketball teams will intentionally miss their own free throws, or intentionally foul the other team as the end of the game situations dictate. The IBB is just a strategic option, and I don’t think we should be banning strategies from games.

The irony of it all is that it’s a counterproductive strategy in most circumstances, so I see no reason to “ban” managers from shooting themselves in the foot if they so desire. Furthermore, I don’t see how you could effectively ban the practice anyways, since managers could just order the “unintentional-intentional walk” and avoid the ban but get the same results.

If this rule is in effect and I was a pitcher, I’d just hit the guy instead if I wanted to walk him. Not to hurt him, but you’d see a lot more hit batters and pitching way inside.

You hit him in the ass.

Turn back the clock rules:

5 balls = walk
4 strikes = strikeout

Hitter selects where pitch is to be thrown or it’s a ball.

*But NOW, make every hitter swing a 38-ounce bat and wear wool unis.

Move the fences back to pre-WWII distances.

No gloves of any kind.

Keep integration.

The big problem is the dilution of talent in MLB. If your lineup is strong enough there’s little incentive to walk a big hitter. If you walked Mays you had to face McCovey. Walk Manny Ramirez and you had to face Ortiz.

Don’t like intentional walks? Get some better hitters and make the opponents pay.

Maybe in some cases the IBB is the best strategy. I was thinking about the expected value of a plate appearance. Wouldn’t it be the players OBP weighted by SLG*4? (Undercounts walks, but close enough.)

So that Pujols, a career .420/.617, has an expected value per plate appearance of roughly .420+.617*4 or 1.037. The value of a walk is OBP=1.000, SLG=.250, or 1.250. So only if you think Pujols has much better chance than average against the pitching matchup should you IBB him.

Is that too simplistic even for managers? Pujol’s SLG would have to be .053 higher to make it a toss-up. (Or his OBP .213 higher, or a combo of the two, etc.). That’s the equivalent of Pujols having 39 more career home runs than his current 445.

E.g., you have be Barry Bonds at his peak for a manager to ever say “the odds were in my favor to walk the SOB.”

A well balanced team can be better than a team with one superman and a bunch of below average players, as the Rangers discovered years ago with Alex Rodriguez.

This is silly to talk about this. And this is totally different from football. Taking a knee and other time delays take away the opportunity from the other team to make a comeback. It effectively ENDS THE GAME. Baseball has nothing like this. All nine innings get played, no team is left losing with an opportunity taken away from them to score before getting three outs. One team is matched against the other team.

 If you want to say you can’t intentionally walk, then you might as well say you can’t bring in a lefty relief pitcher to face a key lefty in the line up, or that you can’t sacrifice bunt, or that you can’t bunt if the pitcher has a leg injury, or you can’t make a defensive substitution. The more you think about it the sillier it gets.

There are lots of ways to eliminate strategy to make the game more exciting. You want to see Pujols hit, but what you are advocating is essentially forcing pitchers to throw strikes. So, what if Pujols hadn’t swung at that ball four from Feliz, should the defensive team have been punished in some way. After all Feliz actually wasn’t trying to get Pujols out – he was trying to get Pujols to get himself out.

It’s baseball, right? With the Cardinals you can walk a guy and get the next guy to hit into a double play. So, you try to get him out but do it in a different way. Afterall, if the walked runner isn’t running with the pitch then he is being a bad sport by not trying to avoid the double play….

I think limiting relief pitchers makes more sense in the context of the game than your proposal to limit intentional walks. Baseball already has enough situations where the umpire has to infer the intent of a player.

I would make a rule that says the catcher must be crouched down in the catcher’s box every time a pitch is thrown to home plate.

It would not kill the essence of the IBB because managers would just hit batters with pitches or tell the pitcher to throw 4 balls in the other batter’s box in their normal pitching motion to accomplish the same task.

Some of the examples in other sports: taking a knee, the quarterback throwing the ball away, running out of bounds to avoid a hit, intentional fouls to stop the clock (basketball) and fake injuries and going down to draw a penalty (soccer) are much more repugnant that the intentional walk. The intentional walk usually happens in critical spot in the game, and there is a substantial penalty attached to putting a baserunner on. It is a straighforeward tactical decision balanced by the risk that the next batter will hit the cover off the ball.