Intentionally walking Barry Bonds - bad for baseball?

Cafe Society
1

This thread inspired by King Kaufman’s most recent column in Salon.com.

The statistics concerning the intentional walking of Barry Bonds are pretty staggering. Kaufman’s colum essentially says, yeah, the numbers are pretty bad, but tough noogies, them’s the rules, and the Sacred Gods of Baseball demand that we just let it be. (The Sacred Gods of Baseball also condemn interleague play, apparently, which would deprive us of the annual North Side- South Side grudge match in Chicago. The Sacred Gods of Baseball also once said that the majors were only available to whites, so I really don’t put much stock by what the Sacred Gods of Baseball say.)

Anyway, what do you think? Is the intentional walking of Bonds becoming excessive? Is it bad for the game?

My view - it is, but I’m not sure how, short of forbidding the intentional walk altogether, it could be addressed (which is kind of Kaufman’s point). Personally, I think it’s a disservice to the fans, who pay to see Bonds hit, and a disservice to Bonds himself, who is being handicapped in chasing what might well be a very attainable goal for him - the all-time home run total.

Thoughts?

2

It’s just another strategy. Depends on the current status of the game.

When/if the time comes, no pitcher will want to be the pitcher Bonds hit his 715th or 756th off of.

3

How could you go about forbidding the intentional walk altogether?

The only proposal I’ve heard that is even possible, is for all 4 pitch walks with no one on base, the batter gets second base. I think this is a terrible idea, and since Bonds gets the intentional pass even when there are runners on base, it wouldn’t fully address the problem.

For years, people have also been saying something has to be done about the number of pick-off moves allowed. But, like the IW, what can you really do about it without drastically altering the game?

Pash

4

He still has 18 hrs on the season - good enough to be tied for 5th. Granted, he already has 150 walks (regular and intentional) - that’s a LOT. Getting on base 3.3 times a game only helps that. Sure, it’s cutting into his homerun pace - but he’s still hitting them every 8.33 at-bats.

And it is a legitimate strategy. When he hit 73 hrs in 2001, he was hitting them every 6.52 at-bats, so it certainly slows his production pace. But while the fans pay to see Bonds hit, they also pay to see the Giants win. And in the converse, the opposing team’s manager also gets paid to win - not to entertain.

5

That’s baseball. The best way to react is to boo and twirl rubber chickens and hope that you can shame the opposing manager into giving Barry the odd strike or two. And have a reliable hitter behind Bonds…

The Giants can solve this problem by finding a reliable hitter to slot into the batting order behind Bonds. While Jeff Kent was a cranky sourpuss and clubhouse cancer, he protected Bonds quite well from the near automatic base open walk. As soon as they let him get away, Barry started setting walk records. Since then, Edgardo Alfonso, Andreas Galarraga, Benito Santiago, et. al. have been on the whole pretty lousy at picking up the team after Bonds trots down to first.

There is no doubt that had the Giants laid out the cash for Vlad Guerrero during this past off-season we wouldn’t be having this discussion…

6

Fiddlesticks hit it exactly. If the Giants don’t want Bonds to get the automatic walk, they need to make the other team pay for walking him. That means another power hitter in the lineup.

Personally, I couldn’t care less about Bonds or his record. I don’t like him as a person, and he plays for the second-most-evil team in MLB. But changing the rules just because he is getting walked is stoopid.

7

Bonds actually has 97 walks–97 in 60 games! At this rate he will have twice and many career walks as strikeouts.

8

I’ve also heard that for an intentional walk, all runners advance a base. So if you intentionally walk Barry Bonds with a guy on third, you’re walking in a run. Of the suggestions, that bothers me the least. But no, I’m one of the acolytes of The Sacred Gods of Baseball (derided in the OP - you better believe I want to dump interleague play… if Chicago really wanted to play Chicago, they can win their pennants.) so, AFAIC, the correct answer is to suck it up and deal with it until he retires.

9

Agreed. Changing the existing rule for a freak of nature like Barry Bonds, a player of a caliber we probably see once every fifty years, is just going to cause undue headaches once he retires. Did we increase the distances between bases when Rickey Henderson was in his prime? Of course not.

10

Changing the rules for Barry is just dumb - and I’m a Giants fan! Brian Sabean needs to get off his ass and find someone to bat fifth (or, to be pedantic, fourth, since Barry prefers to hit third when feasible).

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I suppose I shouldn’t comment, because I’m not a fan of baseball in general.

However, I do have an opinion and you have asked for one…

Yes, I think it is bad for baseball. But as other have pointed out, it would be very difficult to enforce a rule banning the intentional walk.

Still, I would like to see a pitcher pitch his best game.

12

I’m not sure what your point is exactly. When a pitcher is pitching his best game, walking Bonds is the smart move a lot of the time.

13

Just curious. What’s the argument against inter-league play?

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Basically 2:

  1. The leagues play by different rules.

  2. I-play decreases the allure of the World Series, espically if it is between close interleague rivals who played each other during the same season. One of the lowest-rated World Series nationwide was The Yankess vs. the Mets in 2000. of course, they played each other during the season.

15

I don’t want DH stank on my clothes after I leave the ballpark.

Re the OP, what Kyla said. If we don’t want the opposition to walk Barry, then we need to give them a reason not to. Rubber chickens does not count.

16

Since I have no qualms about totally dismantling the game and rebuilding it with completely different rules, how about this:

At the end of each inning, record which runners were at which bases when Out #3 was recorded. (If Out #3 was the result of a force, record their positions before the force was possible. If Out #3 was a flyout, likewise.) Then at the start of the next inning, put those same runners back on those same bases. That way, every walk could come back to haunt you an inning or two later.

Or how about this: Keep the existing rule where all the bases are cleared at the end of an inning. But, instead of having 9 innings of 3 outs each, have 3 innings of 9 outs each. Then you’ll only be inclined to walk Barry after you’ve accumulated 7 or 8 outs in the inning. It’ll also vastly increase the number of sacrifice plays we see, but will reduce the number of hit-and-run plays.

17

That’s how it was in the earliest days of baseball, when you had other neat rules like:

  1. Nine balls for a walk.
  2. Batters could request a high or low pitch.
  3. Fielders recorded outs by beaning runners.
  4. Balls caught on one bounce were outs.
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The main argument right now (and I agree) is that it unbalances the schedules even more ridiculously and can affect both the divisional races and the Wild Card races.

An example would be one division getting to play the AL Central for several series and another having to play the AL East or West. Or one division getting to feast on the NL West and another stuck with the NL Central.

Quite frankly, interleague needs to be severely reduced. There are only four markets where it’s really that great - New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles/Anaheim and San Fran/Oakland. So keep interleague for two three game series (home and away) for the “rivals” and drop it for the rest of the season. To make it even better, take the remaining interleague games and turn them into divisional series.

19

Yeah, that’s what I’d like to see happen. Keep six interleague games for that natural rival and move on.

As it is depending on which group of interleague games a team is playing can significantly effect the strength of schedule between teams in the same division.

And that sucks.

20

Yep. And in basketball, if you are ahead, it makes sense to simply throw the ball back and forth between players, rather than shoot and risk losing possesion. But it is boring as piss and so they put a rule in making a team shoot in X seconds. If I’m gonna bother with baseball, I wanna see the pitcher pitch and the batters bat. And if they’re gonna walk him intentionally, don’t waste my time, simply nod at first base and let him walk. Baseball is already excrutiatingly dull, why make us watch that nonsense?