Phillies Win on a Walk

The Nationals ended their bid at a 4-0 start to the season when Jesus Colome walked in the winning run after intentionally loading the bases. This is not the first time Manny Acta has walked the bases loaded.

On April 20st in the bottom of the 13th inning, Hanley Ramirez was walked with a runner on 1st and 2nd to load the bases for Matt Treanor in a move that eventually worked out to the Nationals advantage.

There was a very informative post by MGL and discussion following those events on The Book Blog.

However, this situation was considerably different in that there was already a runner on third with one out and Chase Utley was intentionally walked leaving a runner at 1st and 3rd. Walking that batter actually increased the win probability of the Nationals and was unquestionably the correct move. Then Ryan Howard was intentionally walked to load the bases to bring up Jayson Werth.

To me this seems like you’re pitting Ryan Howard’s batting average and sac fly potential against Jayson Werth’s OBP and sac fly potential. A ground ball or an error could score the run too, but I think that’d be just as likely to happen with Werth at the plate as with Howard, so lets run some quick back of the envelope calculations.

Let’s say any outfield fly will score the runner and Howard hits outfield fly balls in about 22% of his plate appearances. That’s a 22% chance he’ll score the run right there. Then there’s the chance that he gets a hit on a non-fly ball, which is about 12.3% of his plate appearances. Now we’re up to a 34.3% chance that Howard will win the game in this at-bat. There’s also a 16% chance he’ll walk anyway, making the Nationals chance at a “favorable outcome” in this at-bat about 50-50.

Then there’s Jayson Werth, who if we run the same exercise for, hits outfield fly balls about 28% of the time, non-fly ball hits about 19% of the time, and walks 15% of the time, giving him about a 62% chance to win the game.

Maybe we add +10% to Howard and -10% to Werth because of righty/lefty splits, making the game winning percentage for Howard 44% and the game winning percentage for Werth 52%.

I guess the question is, how much more likely is a double play going to be made with the bases loaded than with a man on 1st and 3rd? I’d think the chance would have to be considerably higher in order to justify walking the batter unless the batter is much much worse.