Intentional-Walk Immunity, Featuring the Blue Jays

If aliens landed on Earth and, rather than asking about our political systems or scientific accomplishments, inquired about the last 20 years of baseball philosophy, one of the things you would highlight is the growing disdain for the intentional walk. Certainly, there are times when an intentional walk makes sense, but one of the fundamental lessons of the era is that giving the other team a free base runner is typically foolish.

As Ben Lindbergh wrote at FiveThirtyEight, managers are increasingly aware of the downside of the intentional walk, and as a result, they’re are on the decline across the league. Billy Beane didn’t wake up one morning, discover intentional walks were bad, and begin a crusade against them or anything, but intentional walks have clearly fallen out of favor as teams, writers, and fans have gotten on board with a more data-friendly approach to the game.

As such, we’ve trained ourselves to see intentional walks negatively by default and praise teams that don’t issue them. If teams are issuing fewer intentional walks, we normally see that as a positive sign, so forgive me for the investigation I’m about to undertake to explore the opposite.  In 2015, the Blue Jays both (a) possessed an exceptional offense and yet (b) were on the receiving end of a shockingly low number of intentional walks.  What was the rest of the league thinking?

Let’s review the particulars. The Blue Jays posted a 117 wRC+ as a team in 2015, which left them tied with the 2009 Yankees and 2011 Red Sox for the highest wRC+ since 2008, which will be our sample for the rest of the post. In other words, this was one of the best offenses of the last eight years. On the other hand, they also received the fewest intentional walks (12) of any team in the same sample.

Granted, that might not be terribly unusual. I shared a version of this fact on Twitter last week and two people hypothesized that this makes sense because there’s no point in issuing intentional walks if the next hitter is also amazing. Ideally, you want to issue intentional walks only when the following hitter is sufficiently worse than the one at the plate. This seems plausible, but is it consistent with common practice around the league? That’s a good question. So before we ask why this happened, we need to know if this is a little weird or super weird.

First, let’s compare wRC+ and intentional walks (we’ll add controls shortly).

Right away, we have some evidence for super weird. That’s the 2015 Blue Jays way up in the left-hand corner, basically by themselves. As an aside, the team at the bottom is the 2013 Marlins and those two in the top right are the 2008 (Albert Pujols!) and 2011 Cardinals (Pujols and Lance Berkman).

But if you’re paying attention you know that intentional walks have been on the decline in recent years, so it’s not fair to compare a 2015 team to a 2008 team directly. You also probably know that intentional walks are more common in the National League than the American League. So let’s look at wRC+ compared to the team’s share of their league’s IBB for that season. That should give us a much better picture.

Hey, look! The Blue Jays are still super weird. The Jays were the league’s best offense in 2015 and made up just about 3% of the intentional walks in the American League. Better yet, they led all of baseball in total walks in 2015. What could possibly explain this? And what does it mean?

The most logical theory is that teams just went with the “unintentional intentional walk” against the Jays this season. That is, they pitched around them with the same frequency, but just didn’t throw four totally non-competitive pitches to execute that choice.

I don’t think there’s a perfect way to measure this, but let’s try a couple data points. According to the Baseball-Reference Play Index, the Blue Jays were 16th in four-pitch walks in 2015, recording 106 of them, sixth among AL teams. Generally, teams who hit like the Jays are responsible for at least 7% of the league’s intentional walks (essentially they’re always on the right side of the distribution), so the Jays would need to be 15-16 unintentional intentional walks ahead of their AL counterparts for this to add up.

But four-pitch walks might not be the best way to get to this, because it’s fairly typical for a pitcher to throw one down the middle on 3-0 even if he’s pitching around the batter at the plate. So let’s look at all walks that started with a 3-0 count. This was trickier to do, but assuming I carved up the data properly, the Jays ranked seventh in baseball and fourth in the AL last year in this type of walk.

While that might seem like evidence in favor of the point, I don’t believe it is. Remember, we’re trying to find evidence that a disproportionate number of the Blue Jays’ unintentional walks were intentional walks in disguise. All we find here is that the Jays have slightly more four-pitch walks and walks after 3-0 counts than the average AL team. What we would expect to find, if our hypothesis were true, is the Jays have more of these kinds of walks than virtually all of their AL counterparts, and this is especially unfruitful given that the Jays led the league in total walks, so you would expect to see more of every type of walk if the walks were distributed normally.

Recognizing that we can’t completely rule out the previous theory, I think it’s safe to say it’s not looking good. So this means that we are probably observing a real phenomenon in which the league intentionally walked the Blue Jays far fewer times than you would expect for a team of this caliber.

A reasonable explanation might be that the Blue Jays, by virtue of their excellence, had a bunch of runners on first base, taking the intentional walk away from the opposing team. But remember, we’re comparing them to other great offenses from recent history, so it doesn’t seem like that should explain such a significant difference. After all, the Blue Jays would have two to three times as many intentional walks if they were a typical club with a great offense.

And the idea that the Jays had so many good hitters as to discourage intentional walks is also suspect for the same reason. It’s plausible that adding good hitters to a lineup might discourage intentional walks, but the data does not support that given the average rate of intentional walks to other great offenses. I also ran run differential against intentional-walk share, but the graph looks very similar. Average margin of victory doesn’t do the trick, either.

I have one final theory, but it’s one that I don’t really have the skills to test in a conclusive fashion, so I’ll just look at a couple of comparisons. Here’s the theory: perhaps the Blue Jays got out to a disproportionate number of early leads. On average, teams are less likely to issue intentional walks until a game is late and close. It figures then, that if the Jays jumped out to early leads relative to other great teams of the recent past, this might explain the lack of intentional walks.

Let’s compare the Jays’ average lead after each of the first eight innings with those other two 117 wRC+ clubs. Theoretically, we could do this with every team in the sample, but I was unable to find a timely way to do so and would welcome someone with the necessary coding ability to follow up. The graph below compares the three teams’ average leads after each inning with their average lead after eight innings (i.e. Average Lead After Inning 3/Average Lead After Inning 8). In other words, how quickly did each team approach their final margin of victory?

I graphed it like this because run differential itself didn’t explain anything. The Jays had a better differential than most teams and still found themselves way out of step, so here we’re looking at a couple of other great offenses and how quickly they took their average final lead. I don’t think this is definitive proof, but it’s mildly suggestive. Relative to the two other offenses we selected, the Jays scored a higher percentage of their runs early, potentially negating the intentional walk later.

This might not convince you. I’m not necessarily convinced either, but the theory makes sense and the first comparison is consistent with the theory.

The 2015 Blue Jays featured a great offense that didn’t get walked intentionally as often as you would expect for such a great-hitting club. The data indicates that this can’t easily be explained away, and the best answer at which I can arrive is that the Jays beat teams early and took the intentional walk out of the opposing toolbox before it could be deployed. I don’t have any logical explanation for why the Jays would be better at scoring early relative to any other great offense, but it might worth exploring if the same pattern continues into 2016.