Intentional walks are the worst. Long live intentional walks.
Just how much time would be saved by eliminating the four-pitch intentional walk? Not as much as you think.
No more of this:
No more of this:
That’s the gold standard, the default sermon from the Church of Youneverknow. What about the players who get hits during their intentional walks? Having watched that video 16 times just now, it’s a compelling argument. Getting rid of the silly IBBs is an awful side effect.
However, allow me to flash my credentials as Giants fan at the turn of the century. Barry Bonds was intentionally walked 120 times in 2004. That’s more combined intentional walks than the Blue Jays have received since 2011, and it was as tedious to watch as it sounds. Here’s a game in which Bonds was walked intentionally four times, most of them in crucial game situations. The Dodgers won the game with the help of those walks, but they turned Barry Bonds at-bats into Cody Ransom at-bats, which is a strategy that should be covered under the Geneva Convention. So I’m no friend of the intentional walk. The minute spent on them is a minute longer until the real baseball comes back.
It’s this balance, then, that’s at the heart of the new rule. We know two unassailable truths:
- Weird things can happen during intentional walks, and weird things are a part of baseball’s soul
- Intentional walks are boring and awful
How much boring and awful would we have to keep around just to give us a chance at the odd things? The odd, wondrous events that run through baseball’s veins and give it life? Let’s count the boring and awful.
In the 2015 season, there were 951 intentional walks in all of Major League Baseball, or 31.7 per team. That means that on average, teams would be issued an intentional walk about every five games. That’s a minute of awful and boring mixed into 900 minutes of baseball. To get rid of that minute, baseball would take away some of our weird.
And intentional walks are going down, too, which makes the timing extra weird:
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