{"id":110,"date":"2010-04-14T15:24:06","date_gmt":"2010-04-14T20:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/?p=110"},"modified":"2010-05-09T04:18:58","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T09:18:58","slug":"why-didnt-they-just-walk-casey-the-use-of-the-intentional-walk-in-major-league-baseball-by-justin-abramson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/archives\/110","title":{"rendered":"Why Didn’t They Just Walk Casey? The use of the intentional walk in Major League Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"
April 14, 2010<\/div>\n

\"casey\"<\/p>\n

Saturday night, in the bottom of the 14th inning with the Padres up one run on the Rockies, manager Bud Black<\/a><\/strong> had a decision to make.\u00a0 There were two outs and the tying run was on second.\u00a0 Ian Stewart<\/a><\/strong> was at the plate and Chris Iannetta<\/a><\/strong> was on deck.\u00a0 Black decided to walk Stewart, putting the winning run on base, and pitch to Iannetta (even though Iannetta had already gone deep in that game), who struck out to end the game.\u00a0 He looked like a genius at the time, but things could\u2019ve been much different had Iannetta ripped a two-RBI double down the right field line to win it.
\nThis reminded me of Ernest Thayer\u2019s famous 1888 poem, \u201cCasey At the Bat\u201d.\u00a0 For those who don\u2019t know it, it can be found here<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 The story details a team down by two runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.\u00a0 Two weak hitters proceed to hit a single, then a double, which brings up the star hitter, \u201cCasey,\u201d with the tying run in scoring position and two out.
\nWe all know how the story ends.\u00a0 But what might a major league manager have done in this situation?\u00a0 If he\u2019s 2009 Manager of the Year Jim Tracy<\/a>, <\/strong>he might have walked Casey.\u00a0 And this seems to make sense.\u00a0 First base was open and Casey represents the most feared hitter on the team, if not in the game.\u00a0 In addition, Casey was likely a big, strong home run hitter built like Jason Giambi<\/a>\u2014<\/strong>it\u2019s unlikely that he had even average speed, and so he may not even have been able to score on a double from the next hitter.\u00a0 What\u2019s not to like?<\/p>\n

The first thing not to like is that an intentional walk increases the expected number of runs scored in any inning (Source: Baseball Prospectus at http:\/\/www.baseballprospectus.com\/statistics\/sortable\/index.php?cid=68778<\/a>), regardless of how many are on base and how many are out.\u00a0 Of course, this doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s never a good idea\u2014sometimes the hitter at the plate is significantly better than the one on deck, and sometimes the extra 1\/3 of a run (or so) that the walk creates would be nearly meaningless to the outcome of the game.\u00a0 In the top of the ninth, with the pitching team down a single run and with runners on second and third with two outs, an intentional walk does not hurt the pitching team in any significant way, because if that run were to eventually score, it would mean the difference between having to score three and four runs in the ninth inning\u2014a scenario so unlikely anyway that only a small difference in ability between the on-deck hitter and the hitter at the plate would prompt an IBB.<\/p>\n

Steven Biel did an analysis here: http:\/\/bleacherreport.com\/articles\/320766-rating-the-managers-by-intentional-walks<\/a> of intentional walks issued in 2009, and he ranked the managers by how often they issued intentional walks that had no statistical chance of improving the pitching team\u2019s chance of winning.\u00a0 For this analysis, I care less about the manager and more about the aggregate picture of the walks issued.\u00a0 In 2009, there were 1179 intentional\u2014roughly one every two games.\u00a0 Biel\u2019s very conservative analysis (done with the help of Baseball Prospectus\u2019s run prediction indexes) showed that 246 of these provided no help to the pitching team.\u00a0 This is an amount in excess of 20%.\u00a0 More than one in five times where the manager decides to go to the well with the intentional walk, it is a mistake.\u00a0 Further, with 246 \u201cbad\u201d IBBs in 2,431 games in 2009, this means that once in every ten games (well over once per day) a manager is making a mistake and putting his team at a disadvantage by allowing another runner to reach base.<\/p>\n

So to answer my own question earlier, issuing an intentional pass to Casey might have worked out all right.\u00a0 But considering that Casey was probably batting in the #3 spot, walking him would have put the winning run on base with the cleanup hitter at the plate\u2014likely providing a much better opportunity for joy in Mudville than the opposing team did by taking their chances with Casey.\u00a0 However, Biel\u2019s analysis suggests that many of the 30 major league managers would have chosen to walk Casey, as Bud Black did most recently on Saturday, April 10.\u00a0 Taking into account the number of intelligent people in the United States who would leave well-paying jobs today for a chance to make $10 an hour as a major league manager, it does seem strange that managers so often make the move to put a runner on base when it makes no statistical sense to do so.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April 14, 2010 Saturday night, in the bottom of the 14th inning with the Padres up one run on the Rockies, manager Bud Black had a decision to make.\u00a0 There were two outs and the tying run was on second.\u00a0 Ian Stewart was at the plate and Chris Iannetta was on deck.\u00a0 Black decided to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,18,6,13,14],"tags":[211,214,213,212,218,216,215,210,217],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions\/182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}