More Walks

A closer look at a record season

More Walks

You might remember a post I wrote a few weeks ago about walks in 1949.

A kind person on Reddit directed me to a brief article Steve Treder wrote on the subject for The Hardball Times almost 20 years ago. I’m impressed that this random internet stranger remembered an article from the earliest days of the now-defunct Hardball Times, and I thought it would be appropriate to mention in these pages.

Treder

Treder’s article is worth a read — but it strikes me as an incomplete argument.

Basically, Treder argues that the following three factors contributed to the American League having such an insanely high walk rate in the late 1940s and early 1950s:

• AL umpires having a smaller strike zone, ostensibly due to how they wore the chest protector

• The American League having hitters that were more patient

• The American League teams using more pitchers with higher walk rates.

My biggest problem here is that the second and third points are fundamentally tautological. The problem that we’re trying to understand is why American League pitchers between 1947 and 1955 walked so many batters, and why so many American League batters were walked. It’s not helpful to conclude that walk rates were high because pitchers walked more batters and more batters drew walks. You can’t restate the problem and call it the solution.

In fact, I’m having a really hard time understanding the fundamental logic behind that idea. Unless we think that American League scouts were specifically looking for hitters who focused on taking walks (and I think we have a lot of anecdotal evidence that they were not), we’re going to really have a hard time explaining why one league suddenly accumulated a ton of walk-heavy players while the other league was relatively unscathed.

By the way, Treder is incorrect in his assertion that National League walk totals in the late 1940s and early 1950s were “only slightly above their historical averages.” Actually, at the time this period was also a peak in walks for the National League. Here is a graph of walks per nine innings in National League history, separated by year:

It’s important for me to note here that this graph only goes back to 1901, ignoring early eras of high walk totals due to differing rules. The National League in 1949 and in the surrounding years was also at a historical high total number of walks.

The umpiring argument is intersting, but falls on its face when you realize that the difference in chest protectors existed before and after this era.

Something else must have been going on. I still don’t have a good answer, but I think we’ll find something eventually.

The Sporting News

While looking for something completely unrelated, I stumbled across this from the September 15, 1948 issue of The Sporting News:

Again, there are no good answers here, but we know now that at least somebody was paying attention.