Everyone here who would care knows that I’m a big fan of the walk as an offensive weapon.* I think for all the walk talk of the last few years, the walk is STILL underrated. in fact, I’m fairly confident that right now some brilliant reader is already cracking his/her fingers and preparing to write an extensive response about how a walk is not as good as a hit and how you can’t drive a runner home from second base with a walk and how teams cannot walk their way to victory and so on.
*It is my appreciation for the walk, no doubt, that makes me DESPISE the intentional walk. Man, do I hate the intentional walk. And so, you can imagine how pleased I was this week to see (thanks to BR Nick) that my old friend Ozzie Guillen blew not one but TWO games against the Oakland A’s with intentional walks. To be fair, he didn’t actually BLOW either game since his team was shut out both days … the Sox weren’t going to win those games. But both ludicrous intentional walks did the exploding cigar in his face.
Tuesday night, with the score 2-0, fifth inning, the Oz made the miraculous decision to intentionally walk Jack Cust with runners on second and third and two outs. I’m a big Jack Cust fan … but this would almost never make sense. For one thing, the guy’s a lifetime .240 hitter. Yes, he will run into the occasional ball (he had hit a home run earlier in the game against Bartolo Colon, which probably influenced the decision) but he’s not really the guy you fear with runners on second and third and two outs.
Here was the real kicker … the next batter was MATT HOLLIDAY. As in, the guy with a lifetime .317 batting average. As in the guy with a 131 career OPS+. As in a MUCH BETTER HITTER than Jack Cust. It was as baffling a move as you could make … and Matt Holliday smacked the three-run double to prove it.
Move ahead two days. Now the White Sox were trailing 1-0 in the sixth inning. Repeat: The score was 1-0. Runner on second base, one out. And this time, the Oz decided to intentionally walk … right, Matt Holliday. At least this one made strategic sense — lefty Mark Buehrle on the mound and lefty Jason Giambi was coming up and it set up the double play.
But intentional walks in the sixth inning, down 1-0, are always wrong, always, no exceptions, and Giambi put the exclamation point on it with the three-run homer that served justice.
The thing is … everyone knows a walk (in some circumstances) is not as good as a hit. In other circumstances, it’s just as good as a hit. In rare circumstance, you could argue, a walk could be better than a hit. Joe Morgan always thought so. At least he did when he was a player … in a book I keep hearing about, Morgan talks about his perfect run, where he would draw a walk, steal second, steal third and score on a wild pitch or passed ball or short sac fly — he believed that scoring a run without a hit destroys a pitcher’s mental well-being in a way that even a 500-foot homer cannot. This does make sense to me, but obviously that’s just an opinion and anyway, I’m not here to say that a walk is ever better than a hit.
I’m here to say that a walk is NEVER an out. And, because a walk is never an out, it’s a powerful offensive weapon. It puts a runner on base, of course. But it also eats up a pitcher’s pitch-count. It makes the pitcher throw the from the stretch, opens up the left side of the infield, puts the middle infielders at double play depth. A walk changes the complexion of games … and even now, even with all the talk about walks the last few years, I STILL think people wildly underestimate the power of walks.
So, I decided to look at something: How do walks affect games? I decided to look at this because I noticed during the Kansas City Royals horrendous 25-game streak (5-20 now), they have had five games where they walked zero times. That’s awful, awful baseball. Last year the New York Yankees had only five games ALL YEAR where they walked zero times, and the New York Mets had only four games*.
*Not surprisingly, at least to me, last year the Royals were far and away the leader in games with zero walks.
1. Kansas City, 30 games with zero walks.
2. Seattle, 18
3. Anaheim, 17
4. Pittsburgh, 16
5. Toronto, 15
Anyway, it made me wonder — how often does a team win when they don’t walk. So, I ran a few numbers and came up with this chart that includes all games over the last five years:
Number of walks: Winning percentage
0 walks: .305
1 walk: .363
2 walks: .432
3 walks: .495
4 walks: .547
5 walks: .619
6 walks: .645
7+ walks: .715
I ran the numbers individually for each year … they stay pretty consistent. Each of the last five years, teams that walked zero times won anywhere from 28 to 32% of the time. Teams that walk one time won anywhere from 34 to 37% of the time. And so on. There were no wild swings at least not over the last five years. A little later on, I will run a few numbers from years past to see if the walk has gained or lost value over the years.
But for the moment, let’s focus on these numbers. Look: There are hundreds of ways you can break down baseball games. For instance, you can break down games by the number of hits a team gets, the number of times they strike out, the number of doubles they hit and so on. You can break down a team by the number of homers a team gets per game … generally, teams that do not hit a home run in a game win at about a .350 clip, and you can add about 150 points of winning percentage for every homer they hit. Here are the numbers since 2004:
Homers per game: Winning Percentage
0 homers: .342
1 homer: .512
2 homers: ..647
3 homers+: .764
That’s interesting enough … those numbers stay consistent too. But home runs are not easily controllable events. A team cannot really PLAN to come into a game and hit two or more home runs in a game. I mean they can TRY to plan it, but home runs are a combination of many factors. A lot depends on the ballpark (the Chicago White Sox led baseball with 69 games of 2+ homers, and the Philadelphia Phillies led the NL with 62 and both play in bandboxes), the weather, the wind direction, the opposing pitcher, the closeness of the game (will they bring in the closer? Is the pitcher nibbling?), the size of your payroll (sluggers are expensive), the liveliness of the ball and numerous other difficult to measure variables such as which hitters get the mistake pitches.
But walks … sure, there are variables with walks too. But in large part, a team can have a plan to walk a lot. A team can be be built to walk a lot. There have been countless stories written about the Tampa Bay Rays last year and why they were so successful. Well, the Rays had a lousy batting average, and they were middle of the pack as sluggers. True, they were second in the league in ERA, but, Toronto was No. 1 by a lot, and the Rays finished 11 games ahead of the Blue Jays.
Walks? Could be. The Rays went 44-15 in games they walked five times or more … those 44 wins were the most in baseball. Meanwhile, they only had six games all year where they walked 0 times, among the lowest totals in baseball.
The 2008 Rays by the walk numbers:
Walks: Record
0 walks: 1-5
1 walk: 8-8
2 walks: 16-12
3 walks: 16-16
4 walks: 12-9
5 walks: 14-8
6 walks: 11-4
7 walks+: 19-3
There’s something to this, I think. Compare those numbers to the Kansas City Royals of 2008:
Walks: Record
0 walks: 13-17
1 walk: 8-23
2 walks: 13-19
3 walks: 16-10
4 walks: 7-7
5 walks: 7-8
6 walks: 10-2
7 walks+: 1-1
The Royals had a preposterous 61 games when they walked once or fewer — far and away the most in baseball. They went 21-40 in those games. When they walked even TWO TIMES, they actually had a winning record last year. But it didn’t happen nearly enough.
The Rays, on the other hand, had only 22 games where they walked fewer than two times.
That was why I was excited to hear Royals general manager Dayton Moore talk about the importance of on-base percentage during the off-season. I know it’s too simplistic, but I’m convinced that for the Royals offense to go, they need to walk. They’re not going to slug with teams … and anyway, Kauffman Stadium is a tough home run park. They are a million miles away from building a speed-based team. I figured they HAD to go out, get some scrappy offensive players, guys who foul off pitches, walk a ton, can wear down pitchers. Those aren’t easy guys to find but, hey, nobody said the job is easy.
Anyway, the Royals went entirely the other way. They spent the last two off-seasons acquiring and signing guys like Jose Guillen, Miguel Olivo, Coco Crisp and Mike Jacobs, who don’t walk. They have given 789 plate appearances to Tony Pena since the beginning of the 2007 season, and he has walked 17 times. Their own players — David DeJesus, Billy Butler, Mark Teahen — don’t walk much either, even though all three had at one point shown promise.
Now, there’s only so much any general manager and manager and hitting coach can do. Maybe the Royals DO have walking as a high priority and they’ve simply been unable to execute their plan. Maybe they can’t find players with plate discipline. Maybe they are trying to teach it, but it just isn’t taking.
I’ll be honest though: It just doesn’t look that way. I think that while the Royals have had a pointed and lucid plan for building the pitching staff, they’ve been drifting in the wind offensively. They brought in Crisp and Jacobs and Guillen and hoped. They tried to find a middle infielder, could not, and went into the season with Mike Aviles, who was overmatched. They have left first baseman Kila Ka’aihue in Class AAA — the guy walked more than 100 times in the minors last year, and he has a .431 on-base percentage down in Omaha this year.
They talked about walking more, they hired a hitting coach in Kevin Seitzer who preaches discipline and hitting the ball up the middle, and for a while the Royals were getting on base at a surprising rate. But as they say, water finds its own level — or as running back Priest Holmes always used to say: “A cornerback can PRETEND to be a safety. But sooner or later, he’ll go back to being a cornerback.”
Meaning: The Royals are not built to walk. The last 25 games, the Royals are averaging barely more than two walks per … that’s a good way to go on a 5-20 run.
I promised earlier than I would do a quick look back to see if the walk has become more valuable over time. Well, I’ll try this chart. Not sure how it will line up.
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Originally Posted by westofyou
