POLL: How Would You Handle the Intentional Walk?

Whether or not you believe baseball games take too long, whether or not you believe they’re trending in a bad direction, I think everybody can agree that your average game includes too much time during which nothing is happening. So to want to cut down on that is noble, and baseball’s put together a Pace of Game Committee to try to fit these things back under three hours. Already, they’re testing out a variety of proposed tweaks, and while obviously nothing is yet official for the major-league game, here’s something we could see during the regular season in the near future:

Intentional walks will no longer include the pitcher lobbing four balls outside the strike zone. Instead, the manager will signal to the home-plate umpire and the batter will take first base.

So, automatic intentional walks. People have talked about this one for a while. Tuesday night, Aaron Barrett pitched.

It didn’t end up mattering, but at the time, the play was bizarre and spectacular. Right after Barrett had spiked a pitch, allowing the go-ahead run to score, he lobbed an intentional ball well beyond the catcher, and that mistake turned into a critical out. It was high-leverage excitement out of nowhere, and had the intentional walk been automatic, obviously this wouldn’t have happened.

And maybe that’s a bad thing. Or maybe that’s a good thing? How often do you need a surprising result to justify a play’s continued existence? To be sure, it’s not like this is the only messed-up intentional ball in recent history. Here’s an intentional ball wild pitch. Here’s an intentional ball wild pitch. Here’s an intentional ball wild pitch. Here’s an intentional ball wild pitch. Here’s an intentional ball wild pitch. From the collegiate ranks, here’s an intentional ball turning into a home run:

And here’s Miguel Cabrera hitting an intentional ball in the majors a handful of years ago:

People recall the Cabrera hit to this day. Pretty much none of them were actually watching it live. It’s a cherished minor memory, a clever gamble by a hitter who looked to take a pitcher completely off guard. I don’t even know if it was a good idea on Cabrera’s part, mathematically, but it became an instant highlight specifically because no one’s supposed to be able to do that, or to even think about doing that. I like that this play happened.

The conversation around intentional walks is a lot like the conversation around extra points in football. Extra points aren’t automatic, but they’re so close to being automatic that some people believe they might as well be automatic, because, why spend the time if you don’t have to? What’s the point of a play if it’s converted more than 99% of the time? That seems to call for either an automatic point, or a more difficult point to convert. The status quo is weird.

This season, there were 985 intentional walks. Previously, the number hovered a little over a thousand. I don’t know exactly how often intentional walks are messed up, but it almost has to be less than 1% of the time. I don’t think there were ten screwy intentional walks in 2014, Barrett’s included. It’s a tricky thing to research, but we know it’s not that common because when it happens, we react like it’s an uncommon thing. So if intentional walks were too frequent and too long, it would make plenty of sense to do away with them as a process that has to play out. Might as well reduce it to a hand gesture, in that case.

But. (There’s always a but.) I don’t know how long the average intentional walk takes, but I just watched one from April where Carlos Martinez walked Brayan Pena, and the four pitches took about 40 seconds. Everything seemed ordinary so I don’t think Martinez was unusually fast or unusually slow. There’s some other time there, like when Pena approached the plate and when he subsequently headed down to first, so maybe you put it in between 45-60 seconds. Let’s say that’s the length of an average intentional walk. There’s value in reducing game duration where you can, but is that enough of a reduction to justify the lost opportunity for wackiness?

Let’s say that an intentional walk goes somehow awry, I don’t know, 0.5% of the time. Maybe that’s high. Maybe it’s 0.25% of the time. Do you give that up to save a minute? How much do you value unexpected wild pitches? What role does that play in your enjoyment of the game?

Over the weekend, somehow, I wound up watching the end of a football game between Alabama and Ole Miss. It was a game of significance to people with whom I’ll never have any interaction, but it was interesting and I was bored, and Ole Miss scored a go-ahead touchdown late. They subsequently missed the extra point, but a penalty gave them another chance at it. They subsequently missed it again and that led to a nervous final few minutes against the No. 1 team in the country. In the end the score held, but that was weird enough that today I’m referring to a football game on the front page of FanGraphs, so that’s what makes you think. On paper, the automatic conversion makes sense. But there’s also entertainment value in seeing a failed conversion, so I understand why there are still conversions.

This is one of those polls where I really don’t know where people are going to come down. And that’s why I’m interested in the poll results. To be honest, I don’t even know how I feel, myself, because while I’d love a faster game, I also love that the Mariners once scored the go-ahead run on an intentional walk wild pitch. I love that, last night, Barrett turned a humiliating mistake into an out at home at a critical juncture. How rare must a rare event be in order to totally kill it off? Are you prepared to prevent the next Miguel Cabrera-style intentional-ball ambush?

It’s a difficult question to think about. So it’s perfect for a day without baseball. If we can’t watch baseball happen, we might as well think about how it happens.