The intentional walk sucks. OK, yeah, I do realize that is not the most eloquent sentence I’ve ever written … but it’s among the truest. The intentional walk sucks as a strategy. The intentional walk sucks as a competitive maneuver. The competitive walk sucks for spectators. If hate for the intentional walk were gravity, I’d be Jupiter.
None of this is news here. I have written more words about my hatred of the intentional walk than just about anything else.
So why bring it up now? Well, you know, Twitter. Right: I should know better. On Tuesday morning, I saw a tweet from my buddy Vac, linking to a fine piece about how Aaron Judge is making baseball all look so easy.
Then, I saw a quote-tweet from another friend, Jon Heyman.
Mike Vaccaro @MikeVacc
Column: we take it in faith that hitting a baseball as often as Aaron Judge does, as far as he does, is one of the hardest things in sports. Yet Judge somehow makes it all look easy. Ridiculously, impossibly easy. #Yankees https://t.co/5SKQdHRhehAh, you can imagine based on my opening paragraph — this didn’t sit well with me. But there was something very specific about it that didn’t sit well: I do not understand for the life of me why writers, analysts or fans would EVER want to encourage pitchers to intentionally walk great hitters. It blows my mind.
Jon Heyman @JonHeyman
This is true. And why are pitchers making it so hard on themselves by continuing to pitch to him? https://t.co/0rlr0yikAZI hoped my point was clear … but I guess it wasn’t. My point was not that pitchers who intentionally walk great or hot hitters — and the managers who make them do it — are cowards, though they are. My point was not that the intentional walk is singularly anti-competitive among sports, though it is.
No, my point was that in no other sport are people so hungry and eager to make the game more boring and frustrating.
And in return, I promptly got like a flurry of screaming tweets defending the honor of the intentional walk.
Which, you know, was the whole point in the first place.
So, I guess we can go over it again. You should know, there has been a more than 125-year effort to rid baseball of the intentional walk. Seriously. Back in the early 1900s, there were rules being suggested to eliminate a pitcher’s ability to avoid a hitter by pitching around him. The reason it wasn’t eliminated then or since is that nobody has come up with an acceptable way to do it. The best idea I’ve heard is probably Bill James’ proposition that hitters be allowed to decline walks. But it hasn’t really gained any momentum.
I have a theory why the intentional walk is still around: It’s because teams use it pretty rarely (except in the case of Barry Bonds). So, it isn’t really on top of most people’s “problems with baseball” list.
I also have a theory why teams use it pretty rarely: Because it’s just about always a terrible strategy — the run expectancy after an intentional walk ALWAYS goes up. Always. you’ve certainly seen the run matrix. Say you have a runner on second with one out. In the run environment we’re in now, that gives you a run expectancy of .644 runs.
Now, say you intentionally walk the next hitter to set up the double play.
The run expectancy goes up to .908 runs. That’s a huge jump. That tells you the double play possibility does not negate the extra baserunner. Neither does the quality of the hitter. Sure, a lot of the time the intentional walk quote-unquote “works,” but that’s because hitters across baseball this year make outs 68.8 percent of the time. Even great hitters like Aaron Judge make outs 59 or so percent of the time.
But OK, we can (and will) talk about how the IBB is poor strategy another time.
Let’s get back to those folks defending the intentional walk: They came at me with the argument that it’s not cowardly at all but instead a viable strategy for trying to restrict a great player, no different than:
— The Hack-a-Shaq fouling strategy
— Double-teaming a wide receiver or pass rusher
— Not kicking to a great kick returner
— Not throwing to the side of a great cornerback like Deion Sanders
— Playing a box-and-one defense to limit the touches their best scorer gets
— Taking a dive in football to get a penalty
There were probably others, but these seem to be the main ones. With some, I can squint and see the comparison. With others, I don’t get the connection at all.
But, well, I’d say two things — I’ll get to the second in a minute. First, none of these is like the intentional walk, because none of these sports is like baseball. None of these sports are set up so the best hitter will only come up at fairly random times only three or four or maybe five times a game. And none of these sports have the individual-sport-within-a-team-sport qualities that baseball has.
We can go through them, if you want. Double-teaming a receiver or pass rusher or playing a box-in-one is an extreme effort to BEAT that receiver or pass rusher or scorer. It’s not an effort to AVOID them. In a way, those strategies are the exact opposite of the intentional walk. A more apt comparison would be playing a special shift against Judge or throwing him off-speed stuff exclusively or using a pitcher with a windup that gives him particular trouble. Then you’re trying to get him out, just as those strategies are trying to nullify a player’s greatness.
Hack-a-Shaq is not like the intentional walk, either — it’s more like if in baseball you were allowed to keep pitching to the other team’s worst hitter. Anyway, the Hack-a-Shaq sucks too, and there have been consistent efforts to stamp it out.
Not throwing to Deion’s side has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with not pitching to Aaron Judge. Deion is a defensive player. Judge is an offensive player. Totally different. Maybe you could compare not throwing to Deion’s side with not hitting the ball to third base when Nolan Arenado is playing there.
I can’t make sense how intentionally walking Judge is like taking a dive in soccer.
And this leads to the second thing — and my main point. Nobody likes these other strategies. Nobody says, “Hey, we need more Hack-a-Shaq,” in the NBA. Nobody says, “I love soccer dives.”
But say that the intentional walk sucks and people will magically appear to tell you how the only point of sports is to win and the intentional walk is exactly like, I don’t know, blocking a shot in hockey or something, and the intentional walk is a GREAT STRATEGY and THE ONLY WAY TO GO and AWESOME!
The intentional walk is not awesome. The intentional walk is a singular blight in sports. At this very moment, Aaron Judge is the most exciting thing happening in baseball and maybe the most exciting thing happening in American sports. Every at-bat is an absolute thrill. No, you can’t stop managers and pitchers from intentionally walking him if they want, but it would suck the life out of the game, and it would suck the joy out of the moment, and it would just plain suck.
Please, pitchers, try and get Aaron Judge out. You have been playing this game your whole life and you have reached the pinnacle of your sport and you have made your way by challenging the best hitters and getting them out. Aaron Judge is the best. This is the ultimate challenge. Go for it. That’s what baseball is.
And we’ll all watch in awe.
"Because it’s just about always a terrible strategy — the run expectancy after an intentional walk ALWAYS goes up."
You play to win the game. Baseball teams have such detailed analytics in place that if the intentional walk were always suboptimal strategy, in every given situation, then it would be gone from the game. The fact that it is still employed as a tactic is confirmation that the actual run expectancy in that situation goes down instead of up (or that the multiple-run expectancy goes down significantly, which matters...). As you know, Joe, actual run expectancy in a given situation is based on the specific batter's tendencies as compared to the actual pitcher's tendencies weighted by the probability that they can actually execute (where all players are not created equally.)
Even the best hitters only come up once every 9 at bats for their team It amazes me that any fan would want to give up even 1 of those especially if you paid the big bucks to go to the game