So You’ve Intentionally Walked James Wood. What Now?

On Sunday, the Angels made 22-year-old James Wood the first player to receive four intentional walks in a single game since Barry Bonds in 2004. You could argue the plan worked, too, as Wood came up with at least one runner in scoring position all four times, and the only one of those runners to score did so on a bizarre, inning-ending double play. If the Angels’ goal was to avoid the big inning, then they nailed it. If their goal was to win the game, well, hope springs eternal; the Nationals won, 7-4, in 11 innings. The obvious takeaway is the 6’7” Wood is a terrifying talent, but just as obvious is how out of step with current baseball thinking – or really any baseball thinking – this move was.

Wood is having an incredible season, launching 22 home runs, walking 14.5% of the time, and batting .283. His 156 wRC+ makes him the eighth-best hitter in the game this season and a genuine contender for the National League MVP. However, it’s impossible to argue that he’s in Bonds territory. Bonds earned four IBBs four different times that year. He was in the midst of his fifth straight 45-homer season and 13th straight 30-homer campaign. He held the single-season home run record and was closing in on the all-time one. He put up a 233 wRC+ en route to an absurd 11.9 WAR in 2004. He was in his own league. Moreover, the game has progressed in its thinking since 2004, and it’s now widely understood that an intentional walk is rarely the smart move.

Stathead, which uses Retrosheet data from back before intentional walks were an official stat, lists 12 instances in which a player received at least four intentional walks in a game. This John Schwartz article from the 1980 Baseball Research Journal can teach you even more about the earlier history of the IBB, including the contention that Mel Ott received five intentional passes during the second game of a doubleheader on October 5, 1929 (though Retrosheet only lists three of Ott’s five walks that day as intentional). So this is an extraordinarily rare feat, and fully a third of the times it has happened in baseball history, it was specifically happening to Bonds in 2004.

As Alexandra Whitley noted for Baseball Prospectus, Wood’s achievement was all the more notable given the state of the game today: “He’s got some added degree-of-difficulty on account of fewer intentional walks in this era, fewer lengthy extra-inning games, no desirable pitcher’s spot for opponents to target (I’m looking at you, Garry Templeton 4-IBB game), and all four of his IBBs coming as soon as he stepped to the plate, rather than being mid plate-appearance decisions. If you use those conditions, you can pretty quickly narrow this down to the most respect shown to a non-Barry-Bonds hitter since Roger Maris (Sr.), or maybe ever.” All of this is to say this came out of nowhere. Aaron Judge has never received four free passes in a game, and neither has Mike Trout (though both players have, once each, received three).

The part that jumped out at me was the desirable spot for opponents to target. Not only was Wood not batting in front of a feeble pitcher, but the players hitting behind him were actually pretty good! The Angels were being really careful against a great hitter with runners in scoring position, but they were also putting yet another runner on base before they had to face decent hitters. The intentional walks brought up Luis García Jr. once and Amed Rosario three times. García is having a bit of a down year, but he still came into the game with a 101 wRC+. Moreover, he was on a hot streak, running a 137 wRC+ over his previous 12 games, and he’d led off the series with a three-hit game. Rosario came in with a wRC+ of 109. Neither player has scary numbers, but they’re not pushovers either. Wood came into the game with a 156 wRC+, which is fantastic. It’s 49 points above the combined marks of García and Rosario. But that gap is still way lower than the gap between Bonds and Wood – let alone the gap between Bonds and whoever was batting after him.

I was curious how that gap stacked up historically, so I gathered data on the other four-free-pass games (and, of course, Andre Dawson’s five-IBB game in 1990). I looked at each player’s wRC+ coming into the game, and then I subtracted the wRC+ of the next batter in the lineup. A couple explanatory notes before we get into the numbers: We don’t have game logs for some of the older seasons, so in those cases I had to use each player’s full-season stats rather than their stats going into the game. Next, in the majority of cases, the second lineup spot was shared by multiple players, so I calculated a prorated average wRC+ for them. For example, García had one PA and Rosario had three on Sunday, so I calculated their combined wRC+ like this: (101 x 0.25) + (109 x 0.75) = 107.

This chart offers a lot of fun stuff. Only four of these games didn’t go to extra innings, and only three of them saw the team being walked lose. There’s Bonds getting the four-pass treatment twice in a 10-day period. There’s J.T. Snow running a 155 wRC+ in the best season of his entire career, but still trailing Bonds by 81 points. There’s Edgardo Alfonzo, who put up a 150 wRC+ just a few years earlier, made to look like something the cat dragged in. Last and certainly not least, there’s the delightfully nicknamed David “Soup” Campbell.

Back to our original question, Wood’s 49-point advantage over García and Rosario is indeed one of the smallest gaps in the small-sample history of four-IBB games. Its closest neighbor is the 64-point gap in the Templeton game, when the Pirates just walked him to face the pitcher’s spot. Most of the gaps were above 95 points. The four Bonds games averaged 206 points. Two-hundred and six! Bonds was an entire MVP-caliber hitter better than the players batting immediately after him. The Angels’ decision to walk Wood wasn’t unprecedented, but it was unusual even in the context of four-IBB games. It really is hard to wrap your head around.

Before I leave you, let’s look into some of the other fun games on the list. The Maris game ranks second, and it also features the Angels. One year removed from breaking Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record, Maris was having a good but not incredible season. It seems like the Angels weren’t necessarily scared of him in particular. They didn’t just walk him intentionally four times, they also issued three more passes to his teammates. It was one of just eight games with at least seven recorded IBBs. The walking team lost every one of those games except one.

On August 25, 2021, the Dodgers walked the Padres intentionally a record eight times over 16 innings. All eight of their intentional walks came during extras. They were a reaction to the zombie runner, but also to the fact that the Padres had pulled a double-switch that moved their pitcher into the fifth spot in the lineup. Five of the eight IBBs came in service of bypassing the heart of the San Diego lineup in order to face the pitcher – three of them to cleanup hitter Jake Cronenworth, who came so close to making our list – and the ploy worked. The Dodgers won, 5-3.

By far the oddest game on the list belongs to the contest between the Reds and the Cubs on September 7, 1951. On that day, feared slugger Ted Kluszewski flied out in the second inning, grounded out in the fourth, homered in the sixth, and flied out in the eighth. But the game went 18 innings. Kluszewski came to the plate with runners in scoring position in his next four plate appearances. Each time, the Cubs put him on, and each time they avoided a run by getting Hank Edwards out. It wasn’t always easy, though; in the bottom of the 15th, Edwards hit what should have been a walk-off single, but the ball hit the hulking Kluszewski, ending the inning. Kluszewski finally came to the plate with the bases empty in the 18th inning, and the Cubs finally pitched to him again. He hit a leadoff single off Dutch Leonard, who then walked Edwards. After another single and a fielder’s choice, Dixie Howell scored Edwards on a sac fly to left, ending the game after four hours and eight minutes. (As a side note, this absolute classic does not yet have a SABR game story, so if you’re a member, you should volunteer to write it!)

But while that made for a wild and crazy game, the oddest thing is Edwards was a much, much better hitter than Kluszewski both in that season and to that point in their careers. Kluszewski would go on to become one of the game’s great power hitters, launching 187 home runs and running a 144 wRC+ over the next five years, but 1951 was just his fifth season (including his nine-game cup of coffee in 1947), and only once during that five-season span he had put up an an above-average batting line. Meanwhile, Edwards was coming off a six-year stretch during which he batted .286 and ran a 124 wRC+. He batted .364 in 1950! In 1951, Kluszewski batted .259 with 13 homers for an 81 wRC+. It was by far the worst season of his entire career, and he put up -0.2 WAR. Meanwhile, Edwards batted .297 with a 14.9% walk rate that gave him a 116 wRC+. He wasn’t a power hitter, but his on-base percentage was 65 points higher than Kluszewski’s. In a situation where a base hit equals a loss, wouldn’t you rather pitch to the slugger than face the on-base guy, even before you consider the fact that the on-base guy’s batting average is 38 points higher? It’s even weirder than walking James Wood four times.