On Our Love Affair With the Base on Balls

The other night, our man Mitchell stepped to the plate against Eddie Bonine of the Detroit Tigers with the game in a scoreless tie and runners on second and third, two outs.  Mitch put together a fine, fine plate appearance, working the count full and fouling off some junk before ripping a base-hit to left which drove in a run before The Human Windmill worked his magic to end the inning.

I realized something during that plate appearance, though; something which really shook my faith in a sort of tenet of sabermetric dogma:

Sometimes, a walk is truly a suboptimal result for a hitter.

Now, in this particular case, it probably wouldn't have been terrible if Mitch had worked the free pass; standing in the on-deck circle was the best pure batter this team has had in ages, and since there were two outs -- and said batter is, well, not fast -- there was no more hazard in an infield grounder than there would be in any base situation.

But I got to thinking that there were plenty of other situations where, despite Average Run Expectancy increasing, not only would a walk have been a problem, but in some game situations, several different kinds of outs would have been preferable to a walk (and I'm not referring to the "productive out" either.  Consider:

If there had been zero or one out, a walk sets up a double play, especially with our wonderful yet unfleet young friend William at the plate.  Meanwhile, if Mitch hits a grounder in the hole which is problematic but playable it scores a run, and possibly results in a gain of two bases for the team with the runner on second moving to third.  A decent fly ball scores the run.  A confusing pop foul along the first-base box seats scores the run unless the defense is canny enough to let it go.  And if our on-deck hitter is someone who, you know, isn't that good instead of Billy... let's be serious, would you rather Mitch drive in the run yet expend an out, or walk and then sit and watch Saint Willie end the inning with the bases packed?

With two outs, an out is an out, but what if it's not Baconator at the plate, but... say... Olivo?  Well, okay, he might park a granny in the upper deck.  He might also swing at three pitches in Windsor, killing the inning with the bases loaded, and the odds of that are about 10 times as high as the homer.  For that matter, the odds of that with Miggy at the dish are higher than any other outcome, period, which begs the question: does Mitch drawing the walk actually damage the team's chances of scoring rather than increasing them?

I'm not telling any of you anything which you don't already realize, of course; we all know that there is such a thing as situational hitting, even if it doesn't actually mean what the Conventional Wisdom would like us to think it means.  But that particular situation, where Mitch was firmly in control of the at-bat and quite clearly could have worked the walk if he wanted to, got me thinking.

Now, I don't think my thought process actually alters the basic truth that "walks are good".  A guy with high walk totals is contributing to the offense merely by not making outs, regardless of any other considerations.  More importantly, a guy who walks a lot can be safely assumed to actually know where the strike zone is located (or, as Certain Players on this team don't seem to understand, that there is such a thing as a strike zone).

But once one takes into account game situations and the actual opportunity to score runs... we might be overrating the walk when we look at a player's overall batting line.  That, in turn, leads to potentially overrating OBP, and thus OPS. 

I think, perhaps, that this is where sabermetrics is still falling down on the offensive side of the ledger.  Metrics such as WPA sort of try and take this into account, but WPA is a counting stat which only takes into account the game situation at that moment, and it's also obviously skewed toward close games.  (One could argue that driving in a run with a groundout in a 7-2 game is worse, in the end, than drawing the walk and increasing the total number of runs you can expect to score that inning, but one can also argue that chipping away at the lead is never a bad thing.)  And, you know, the increase in expected runs from drawing the walk in that situation is less than two-tenths of a run; it's not like Mitch drawing a walk would inherently lead to some sort of orgaic run-scoring fiesta.

Put another way, on average, run expectancy increases no matter what when you add a baserunner rather than an out, so much so that the folks at BP insist that the only time it's even reasonable to sacrifice is if it's the pitcher or Tony Pena Jr at the plate.  Yet "an increase in run expectancy" is not the same as "an increase in the chance of scoring a run".

Understand, I am not advocating small-ball or one-run strategies.  I'm not talking about laying down sacrifice bunts or trying to deliberately hit a ground ball to the first baseman so the runner can move up a base.  I'm not talking about throwing away outs.  That's almost uniformly a bad idea unless the game really is on the line and you can drastically increase your chances of scoring the go-ahead or winning run.  What I'm talking about is trying to do something with the bat rather than "settling" for a free base, and that perhaps we really need some way to properly determine whether a hitter's actually good at doing it; at choosing to hit rather than take in order to maximize the chances of something good happening.

I had another thought as that one was passing into oblivion, too.

Is there really anything wrong with a player who tends to hit .320 but doesn't walk much, as long as he's got some pop in his bat?  For that matter, is there anything wrong with a player who hits .320 and can't reach the warning track, yet does know how to work the count and draw walks?  Sure, we'd like to have players who can hit .320, jack 30 homers, and draw 100 walks; that's called "I want it all".  But if we look at certain types of players in certain ways, aren't we focusing too much on what they cannot do?

For example, Adam Dunn gets picked on because he's a three-true-outcomes guy, and he hits for a low average.  But the other two points on the triangle are just dandy; he gets on base a lot despite not hitting for average, and he hits for power.  There was this guy once upon a time who hit for a high average and walked a lot, but didn't have any power although he later developed it; Rickey Henderson was a hall of famer before he figured out how to hit 27 homers in a season, wasn't he?

Yet we focus on OBP and SLG and ignore BA, which is admittedly a fluky and not-entirely-meaningful statistic by itself... but in context?  I think we may be looking at a situation where sabermetricians are undervaluing certain hitters simply because they do not walk, without looking at the things they do get done.  Which brings us to the third permutation of the examples above; in his best years, Andre Dawson hit a ton and hit them far, and he was pretty damned good despite not understanding how to steal first base.  Do we, perhaps, undervalue Andre Dawson simply because we overvalue walks?  I think we do.  To hear the stat crowd tell it, the only thing that matters is that he didn't get on base enough; well, there's truth to that, and in Dawson's particular case peripheral stats seem to agree with the assessment.  (In fact, a hitter with Dawson's power should walk a lot more often than he did simply as a result of pitchers trying to avoid throwing him meatballs.)  But as a general rule, I'm not certain that it works.

In the end, I think we may have outsmarted ourselves in the attempt to come up with some grand unifying theory.  Baseball is a game of situations, of pitches, of confrontations.  Every plate appearance is different, and what might be sound strategy in one at-bat might not be so much in the next.  I just wonder if players who know they have a good chance of making something good happen by hitting the ball -- that is, the sort of guys who hit .330 or the sort of guys who slug .500 -- aren't shortchanged when they actually try to do these things, because sometimes it results in not reaching base safely.

And really, let's be honest: if Miguel Olivo steps to the plate with the bases loaded in the top of the first inning with Zack getting ready in the bullpen, do you want him to take ball four, or do you want him to give GMDM yet another reason to consider resigning him?  (Well, okay, we want him to take ball four for the novelty factor, and we definitely don't want GMDM to have any further excuses.)  But really, we want Miguel Olivo to give Zack a 4-0 lead to work with, yet we don't get upset with him if he flies out to the warning track and only drives in one run.  It's a run!  Sure, when he strikes out on three pitches in the dirt, we get pissed.  When he hits into a double play, we get annoyed.  But -- and this is especially important with players who honestly don't seem to know how to take a walk anyway -- don't we want him to try and drive in runs?

Of course we do.  It's just that admitting that requires accepting something which runs counter to the Great God On Base Percentage, and that's heretical.  Well, maybe we need to examine our dogma and try to be more nuanced about it.

Disclaimers:  Although I've already alluded to most of this within the text, let's be clear on some things.  I don't agree with deliberately giving up outs.  I don't agree with hitters showing a disdain for the base on balls or displaying a complete lack of plate discipline.  I am not promoting the concept of "aggressive hitting" as it is commonly understood, nor do I have any truck with the idea of "productive outs" as a plus in and of itself.  I still believe that a high walk rate is a positive, not least because it indicates something about the offense above and beyond the value of the walk itself.