First Inning Intentional Walks
Interesting Strategy
Odd Strategies
While writing the game summary portion of yesterday’s post, I realized that I had forgotten to post about something important.
We’ve talked a little bit about pitcher usage in 1949, and we’ve talked a lot about walks: both here and here. We’ve even taken a quick look at when to bunt.
But what about intentional walks?
Tigers at Indians
It was the bottom of the 1st inning of the Tigers - Indians game. Larry Doby was on third base with two outs. And Tigers pitcher Ted Gray wound up walking Bob Kennedy intentionally.
This one really threw me for a loop, for the following reasons:
There were two outs.
Kennedy wasn’t an absolutely awesome hitter.
Hal Peck, who was on deck, looked to be just as good as Kennedy, though he played an abbreviated season in 1949 (his last year in the majors).
It was the first inning.
If you really want to go down the small sample size road, I’ll bite. Gray was a left handed pitcher. Kennedy’s line in 1949 against lefties was .259 / .328 / .420 in 196 plate appearances — not exactly a member of Murderer’s Row. Peck, on the only hand, only had 3 plate appearances against lefties all year long (and only 32 plate appearances total), putting up a healthy .333 / .333 / .333 line.
In other words, I have no idea what in the world the computer manager was thinking.
In the end, Peck got a base hit, scoring Doby:
Joe Gordon then hit a 3-run homer, and now you know why I didn’t feature this game.
This got me thinking, though. How many times did pitchers give out intentional walks in the first inning in 1949?
First Inning Intentional walks in 1949
It turns out that this odd managerial decision took place 44 times during the regular season.
Now, let’s put this into some context first. There were a total of 9,804 plate appearances in the first inning in 1949, per our favorite Baseball Reference Splits Page:
Intentional walks took place a grand total of 0.4487% of all first inning plate appearances. In other words, I was right to feel that this was a particularly unusual event.
Now, it’s not really all that easy to use Baseball Reference to look for all of those 44 intentional walks. That would be like searching for needles in a haystack by looking at each individual piece of straw one at a time. Fortunately, we can use the Stathead tool to look at all of these events together.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I see something special about these results right from the start, without performing any sort of analysis. Every single time there was a first inning intentional walk, there just so happened to be a man on second base. You’ll also notice that there was never a man on first base when this strategy was used.
In other words, the purpose of the first inning intentional walk was to set up a force play at any base. In fact, most of the time it seems that this move loaded the bases.
There’s not a single instance here of this happening with a runner only on third base.
And that should make sense. There’s really no point in walking one more guy just because you’ve got a runner on third — especially with two outs. You don’t set up a potential double play, since there are two outs. All you do is make the potential damage that a base hit deals even greater.
You’ll also notice that none of the players who were walked were named Bob Kennedy. Most of the players who were walked were known power hitters, with a few exceptions.
The other interesting thing is that the Cleveland Indians, who led the majors in handing out intentional walks (58), only handed out one in this situation. In contrast, Brooklyn seemed more than happy to give up intentional walksin this situation, including two by Ralph Branca in the same inning of the same game.
Let’s look at a few of these in greater detail.
Twice in One Inning
First, let’s see that Branca example. The Dodgers were in the Polo Grounds on July 3, 1949. You can find the play-by-play summary here. The cool part is that we have a complete pitch-by-pitch record, which exists for a number of Dodgers games in the late 40s and early 50s.
Branca gave up a leadoff double on a 1-1 pitch to Bill Rigney to open the bottom of the first. Whitey Lockman then hit a 1-0 pitch to Pee Wee Reese at short, who promptly threw the ball away, allowing Rigney to reach third. I’m guessing it might have been an attempted double play, though the game summary doesn’t tell us.
Bobby Thomson then came up and singled toright field. Rigney scored, Lockman went to third, and Thomson made it to second on the throw home.
And that brought up the first intentional walk, which was given to Johnny Mize.
It looked like the strategy worked when Sid Gordon grounded out to third base for a fielder’s choice. There was now one out with the bases still loaded.
Willard Marshall then hit a single to left field, scoring both Mize and Thomson and sending Gordon to second base. Now it was 3-0 Giants.
Ray Mueller then ground out to second base, advancing the runners to second and third. And that brought up Buddy Kerr with first base open and pitcher Monty Kennedy on deck.
There was the second intentional walk of the inning.
Brooklyn got out of this one without much damage, but suffered for it in the end, giving up 16 runs in an absolute blowout. Interestingly enough, the highlight of the game was pitcher Monty Kennedy, up again with the bases loaded, hitting a grand slam home run in the bottom of the 7th. Kerr was walked to get to Kennedy again, though this time it wasn’t technically intentional.
Now, you be the judge of whether those two intentional walks were worth it or not. That third walk to Kerr, though, was an absolute disaster.
Both Teams
On September 27, both the Cubs and the Reds walked batters intentionally in the first.
This was a meaningless Tuesday afternoon game at Crosley Field, with only 1,242 in attendance to witness this somewhat unusual event.
Hal Jeffcoat opened it up for the Cubs with a single. The play-by-play lists it as a single to pitcher Ken Raffensberger, which I’m having a hard time visualizing. I’m guessing there was some sort of misplay by Raffensberger that wasn’t judged offensive enough to be an error.
Anyway, Herman Reich then doubled, sending Jeffcoat to third, and opening up first base. Cincinnati elected to pitch to Andy Pafko, the third hitter, who hit a little pop fly to the third baseman. Hank Sauer was up next, and he got the intentional walk.
The Cubs wound up scoring twice. One came on a sacrifice fly by Bob Scheffing, the next batter, who lofted one to deep center field. The other came after a passed ball with Bill Serena at the plate.
In the bottom of the first, Harry Walker singled for the Reds (and I’m frankly shocked and dismayed that he was hitting leadoff). Lloyd Merriman then doubled, Walker moving to third. Grady Hatton hit another double, scoring Walker, sending Merriman to third, and sending Cubs starter Dutch Leonard to the showers.
In came Johnny Schmitz to pitch. He struck out Ted Kluszewski, chose to intentionally walk Jimmy Bloodworth, and then retired both Walker Cooper and Johnny Wyrostek in order.
Now, I would have probably walked Kluszewski intentionally and pitched to Bloodworth. I’m not certain I understand the reasoning here. However, it is notable that the Cubs got out of that jam without any further damage done.
In the end, Cincinnati won it 6-5 in a thriller, scoring two runs in a wild bottom of the ninth.
Conclusion
After all of that, what can we conclude here?
First: the intentional walk usually won’t work the way you think it will. I don’t agree with a lot of modern baseball strategy as recommended by the sabermetricans, but I think we can all agree that the intentional walk should be used extremely sparingly.
Second: the intentional walk in the first inning is an extremely risky move.
And, finally: Diamond Mind Baseball’s computer manager has some major logical problems.