So You’ve Decided to Intentionally Walk Shohei Ohtani… Again

John Schneider loves intentional walks. He intentionally walks Aaron Judge more than anyone else. He intentionally walked Cal Raleigh with the bases empty in the ALCS. So he must have felt very strange when the first two games of the World Series passed without a single intentional walk of Shohei Ohtani, a man who has been intentionally walked repeatedly this postseason even though he was mired in a deep slump early on. Now that he’s hotter than the sun, Schneider was no doubt ready to go to his preferred tactic as soon as the situation presented itself.

And oh, did it present itself! Yesterday, the Dodgers and Blue Jays played 18 innings to settle Game 3. Ohtani opened the game with a double, a home run, another double, and another home run, the last hit a game-tying solo shot in the seventh. That second homer set up a perfect storm. Extra innings with the Dodgers batting in the home half meant that Ohtani represented the tying run every time he came to the plate the rest of the way, and you don’t have to roll out the red carpet for Schneider; he’s always ready to deploy some tactics. Ohtani had five more plate appearances in the game; Schneider intentionally walked him in four of them. I did the math to see whether those were good decisions, and how much they affected the outcome of the game.

Intentional Walk Number One
The Situation: No one on, one out, bottom nine, tie game, Jeff Hoffman pitching

The first intentional walk of the night came after Ohtani had worn out Blue Jays pitchers for eight innings. By the time he came to the plate with a chance to walk it off, Schneider was tired of it. He waved Ohtani down to first base, preferring instead to get the platoon matchup and face Mookie Betts.

I plugged Ohtani, Betts, and Hoffman into my matchup model to come up with estimates for each batter/pitcher matchup. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ohtani/Hoffman looks very good for Shohei, to the tune of a wOBA around .400 and home runs in 7.3% of plate appearances. With an average batter at the plate, our WPA Inquirer gave the Dodgers a 58% chance at a victory. Plug in Ohtani, and that number climbs to 60.1%.

The problem is that with a runner on first and one out, good outcomes for Betts get much better. An extra-base hit would now often end the game, while a walk would put Ohtani in scoring position. Even with a meaningfully worse projected batting line – .265/.355/.578 for Ohtani versus .241/.354/.449 for Betts – the Dodgers’ chances of winning rose to 63.9% after the intentional walk.

Conclusion: Intentionally walking Ohtani with one out is a bad plan, even if he gets caught stealing later in the inning.

Intentional Walk Number Two
The Situation: No one on, two outs, bottom 11, tie game, Braydon Fisher pitching

The second intentional walk felt automatic; if Schneider was going to intentionally walk Ohtani with no one on base and one out, he was certainly going to do it with no one on and two outs. There was a righty with muted platoon splits on the mound again, but that didn’t seem like an important part of Schneider’s calculations.

This time, Ohtani projected to do extremely well against Fisher; .270/.379/.549, in fact, as compared to a .257/.393/.447 line for Betts. Once again, though, putting a runner on base and letting Betts end the game with an extra-base hit looks bad for Toronto’s chances when you run the math. With Ohtani at the plate, the Dodgers had a 55.3% chance at a win. When Schneider walked him to bring up Betts, that winning percentage rose to 57.6%, even though the Betts/Fisher matchup was clearly better for Toronto. Putting a speedy runner on first, for free, just has too many ways it can go wrong.

Conclusion: Intentionally walking Ohtani with the bases empty is a bad plan.

Intentional Walk Number Three
The Situation: Runner on third, two outs, bottom 13, tie game, Eric Lauer pitching

The third intentional walk? A gimme. If you’re going to walk Ohtani with no one on base, surely you’ll walk him with the winning run 90 feet away. There was one complication, though; Lauer is a lefty, so the matchup with Betts wouldn’t be good. Schneider had the answer: He walked Ohtani and Betts, loading the bases for Freddie Freeman.

It’s really hard to make the math look good when you intentionally walk the bases loaded. The other team can now score a run with a walk. Freeman has a career .386 OBP; Ohtani has a career batting average of .282. You can see the issue here. Indeed, with Ohtani batting, my spreadsheet says that the Dodgers had a 64% chance of winning. After walking two batters to load the bases for Freeman, it sees Los Angeles with a 67.1% chance of prevailing.

Conclusion: Intentionally walking Ohtani and Betts to load the bases for Freeman is a bad plan.

Intentional Walk Number Four
The Situation: No one on, one out, bottom 15, tie game, Eric Lauer pitching

Well, clearly this one isn’t gonna be good. We already know that walking Ohtani to get the platoon advantage doesn’t make sense with no one on base and one out. Obviously, then, walking Ohtani to have Lauer face Betts and lose the platoon advantage won’t look good here.

More specifically, I had the Dodgers at a 60.5% chance of winning before the walk, as compared to a 64.5% chance of winning after the walk. That’s a huge increase in winning percentage, and it makes sense to me; Ohtani is worse against lefties, Lauer is better against lefties, and we’ve already run the math on one-out, bases-empty walks. This one just had to be worse.

Conclusion: Yeah, don’t do this!

Add everything up, and Schneider cost the Blue Jays an aggregate 0.132 WPA with his intentional walk decisions; in other words, he lowered their chances of winning by 13.2 percentage points. That’s enormous! Teoscar Hernández went 4-for-8 with a home run and only racked up 0.131 WPA. Freeman went 2-for-7 with two walks and hit a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 18th, the biggest play of the game by a mile, and that performance was worth 0.118 WPA. Ohtani was the best player on the field Monday night. Schneider did more to advance Los Angeles’ chances of winning than any other Dodgers hitter, though. That’s not what you want as a manager. Sure, maybe Ohtani would have hit a third, game-sealing home run in one of these at-bats. Maybe he would have ripped a triple down the line. But maybe he would have made an out. He does that more than half of the time! It wasn’t what ended the game, but Schneider’s unwillingness to find out what was in the mystery box made the Blue Jays’ road meaningfully harder last night.