TK note #1: Intentional Walks
Posted by Andy on March 9, 2008
I already mentioned Tim Kurkjian’s “Is This a Great Game, or What?” previously. I just finished the book, and I highly recommend it. While I read the book, I made notes about some great stats that he mentioned. I'm going to make a bunch of "TK notes" here in honor of Tim Kurkjian's fine book.
Note #1 is about intentional walks. Kurkjian mentioned something that I had never noticed: there is a huge disparity in intentional walks issued by team. A disparity for which teams receive the most IBBs would be less surprising (hello, Barry Bonds,) but TK points out that some managers love the IBB and some managers hate it.
Check out the 2007 pitching splits. Boston issued the fewest IBBs with just 20, followed by Anaheim with 22 and St Louis with 25. To be sure, those teams issued fewer IBBs in part because they were better teams and in fewer stickier situations that required IBBs. But, the league leader in IBBs was Atlanta, also a good team, with 89. Bobby Cox is obviously a true believer. Next highest total was 62, from both Philadelphia and Houston.
There are lots of gems like this in Kurkjian's book.
March 9th, 2008 at 9:15 am
It's not really fair to compare AL totals for IBBs and NL totals though, simply because they'll walk the 8th guy to get to the pitcher, really no matter what the case.
March 9th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Good point. The difference between St Louis and Atlanta is alarming, as well as some of the other large differences on that split list.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:15 am
One has to be careful with IBB stats though, because classifying something as an IBB is a subjective (what was the pitcher's "intent"?)not an objective matter. If a manager prefers to do his "intentional walks" as throwing four balls well of the strike zone where the hitter is unlikely ever to touch it or even swing, but without going through the IBB rigmarole of the catcher standing and signalling openly for a pitch out of the zone, such "intentional walks" will probably not be recorded as IBBs but they still pretty much are intentional walks.
March 11th, 2008 at 8:45 am
[...] (Note: if you don’t know what TK notes are, please refer back to this post.) [...]
March 23rd, 2008 at 4:49 pm
It might be fun to find the numbers for intentional walks with the bases loaded
March 23rd, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Sean did that somewhere, although I forget where. There are also articles out there on the Internet about it. The one Bonds received from Arizona is the only one from the last 20 years, I believe, and there were a handful in history before then.
March 23rd, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Here's an article on bases loaded intentional walks.
The SOTD discussion is in the comments to this.
The link to Sean's article is there as well.
March 23rd, 2008 at 7:47 pm
By the way, if you're interested in bases-loaded intentional walks, then you might enjoy playing around with this: http://www.baseball.bornbybits.com/IBB_tool.html