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Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Ending the intentional walk, and breakeven profiles
Poz hates it even more than I do. He has a Pozcast with Bill James, where James talks about it (presumably it’s what we’ve already heard from him, but Poz doesn’t go into it, because he’s pushing the Pozcast… and I’d gladly oblige to listen to it, but I, like most people, am at the office, and I, like many, don’t have a speaker, and if I did, I, like several, would be told to not play that at the office; and I’d read his reader comments, but blogspot is also blocked at the office!).
I agree with Poz. It’s like completely removing Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan from the ice/court, by giving a lesser shooter an extra two feet around him to make the play. At least in football and soccer, when you double-team, the player is still on the field, and that player is still sometimes involved in the play. To emasculate Gretzky and Jordan is extremely anti-sport.
Anyway, I’ve talked about this in the past:
Vladimir Guerrero is up at bat. He is prepared to swing at anything close to the plate. Anything! And still, teams will intentionally walk him. Was there a more tension-reducing sight than when Barry Bonds was coming to the plate with 1B open? This is the complete opposite of what should have happened, and was not what the fans paid to see.
The rule is simple: Any 4-0 walk, intentional or not, results in a two-base penalty. If you have a runner on 2B, the 4-0 walk gets you runners on 1B and 3B. If you have a runner on 3B, then it’s guys on 2B and 3B. And, with runners on 2B and 3B, the batter goes to 1B, the runner on 2B stays put, and the runner on 3B scores.
Under this scenario, how often would a pitcher not give the batter at least one strike? Again, fans win, and the players go back to giving us action and tension.
***
Poz also asks how many walks would a batter need to get if all he did was walk and strikeout (and is a terrible fielder). This is why we have wOBA. It answers the question pretty clearly. Since you need to be a league average hitter to be a DH, that would mean that you need a wOBA of around 0.333 (or whatever the league average OBP is). And with the coefficient of a walk being 0.72 (and the strikeout would be around -.02), then you solve for this:
OBP * 0.72 + (1-OBP) * -.02 = .333
That gives you OBP = .477
So, it’s pretty close to .500. At .500 OBP (that is, one walk for every strikeout), your wOBA is .350. So, you can get about 1.10 strikeouts per walk, and still be breakeven.
Now, even easier than wOBA is Linear Weights, where the run value of a walk is around .32 and a strikeout is around .29 (it depends on the run environment). And .32/.29 = 1.10. This is why I love Linear Weights.
And, if you remember, I talked about K-BB per PA for a pitcher as a great way to measure a pitcher. And a pitcher who strikes out as many as he walks is a replacement level pitcher.
Therefore, to tie it all in, a batter needs to walk more than he strikes out and a pitcher needs to strike out more than he walks. In order to not follow that, they need to bring more to the table. A batter can bring power or a glove or his legs. A pitcher? Well, it’s extremely difficult for a pitcher to bring ANYTHING else to the table. He’s going to have to be an extreme GB hitter to limit “power” (i.e., few HR), or be an extreme pickoff pitcher to limit “legs”, or be able to control balls in play to an extreme extent to leverage his fielders “gloves”.