Devon Young

If you don’t take pitches, you can’t draw walks, and if you’re not on base then you can’t score. Yes, it’s that simple. In Joe Posnanski’s recent blog entry Walk the Walk, he says exactly what I wish the Red Wings batting coach would drill into his hitters heads—

“I’m here to say that a walk is NEVER an out. And, because a walk is never an out, it’s a powerful offensive weapon. It puts a runner on base, of course. But it also eats up a pitcher’s pitch-count. It makes the pitcher throw from the stretch, opens up the left side of the infield, puts the middle infielders at double play depth. A walk changes the complexion of games … and even now, even with all the talk about walks the last few years, I STILL think people wildly underestimate the power of walks.”

The entire blog entry is really worth reading if you want a nice tutorial on some numbers about how walks affect a team’s winning percentage. This leads me to (finally) point out the following stats about our Rochester Red Wings that I’ve been keeping track of—

• From April 26-May 31, they drew 1.73 walks per LOSS (26 walks in 15 games)
• From April 26-May 31, they drew 3.36 walks per WIN (64 walks in 19 games)
• April 9-May 31, the Red Wings were taking just 3.79 pitches per plate appearance.

Are you kidding me? Seriously, are you kidding me?? You aren’t even trying to draw a walk when you don’t see at least 4 pitches. This tells me the batting coach doesn’t get the importance of OBP. It also shows how much more effective the offense is when they walk, which is very important considering the team can’t hit for average very well.

There are a couple weird outliers in there, like the fact that they somehow won 2 games they didn’t draw a walk in. One of those no-walk wins, was a 1-0 game. Besides those two games though, the walk-to-win correlation is very consistent.

So far in June, our Red Wings are drawing a lot more walks (4.8 per game) & scoring more (4.6 RPG). The only reason they’re just 2-3 this month, is because their pitching is in a slump. No matter how much you walk or smack hits, you just can’t beat a team when you allow them to score 30 runs in 3 games.

Anyway, this no-walk-Red-Wings thing really needs to change permanently, not just for a week. Now go read Posnanski’s blog entry I cited.