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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Without getting incredibly granular, it’s hard to make a mountaintop-worthy announcement that teams are figuring out how to use the intentional walk properly. There’s more research to be done here.We do know that the overall frequency of the IBB is down, which is good. We also know that when they do happen, they are happening in higher-leverage situations than five, ten, or 15 years ago. This is almost certainly good.
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1. Bote Man Posted: March 13, 2014 at 01:25 PM (#4670968)FIXED!
Still, I'm skeptical of this. I feel like I see more IBB to middle-of-the-order hitters, and a lot more "set up the double play" IBB, than I used to. And I think managerial incentives suggest this. The effect of an IBB gone wrong feels attenuated... it's not like the IBB directly scores a run... somebody else for the opponent still has to step up. And then if the guy who does get the hit is generally a worse hitter than the guy who got walked, that feels more like "bad luck" than a strategic mistake.
I wonder how the numbers would look if you removed the Boston and Washington outliers (10 and 17 IBBs, respectively -- God bless you, Davey!), and also removed IBBs of the #8 hitter in the NL.
Edit: Of course it also means fewer runners in scoring position and fewer IBB opportunities, so Idk.
But near as I can tell, there is no attempt to adjust for "opportunities" -- i.e. first base open, etc. This is done somewhat by attempting various (indirect)* controls for leverage but the numbers presented are counts (except for IBB/PA). As 4 notes, fewer men on base implies fewer in scoring position with 1st base open, implies fewer IBB opportunities.
* Something of an odd decision. He uses inning, outs and score differential but separately. We've got various overall leverage measures now (WPA, LI, whatever) that using separate components is not necessary these days. It might be worth it to look at the separate components too but the leverage story is a lot easier to tell with a measure of leverage. :-)
What was missing from my memory, and I only found upon looking it up: the pitcher issuing that walk was Greg Maddux. And he's supposed to be smart. Huh.
I took a quick look at the data, and obviously I'd have to do a more detailed analysis accounting for opportunities as Walt mentions in #7, but the first obvious trend that I see is that the percentage of intentional walks issued by a team with a lead is higher than it's historically been. Historically, only about 5-7% of IBB have been issued by a team with a lead; over the past few years that rate has been closer to 10%. That suggests that to the extent that there is a strategic change, the impact has been mostly in situations where the team issuing the IBB is trailing or tied.
-- MWE
He's a good manager and all, but the IBBs are infuriating.
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