Rating the Managers by Intentional Walks

The intentional walk is one of the more controversial baseball plays in sabermetric circles, and for good reason. As you can see from this run expectancy table at Baseball Prospectus derived from the 2008 run environment, putting a runner on increases a team's run expectancy in every base-out situation possible.

In other words, regardless of whether there are no outs and bases empty on or two outs and runners on second and third or whatever other situation you can imagine, issuing a walk always increases the average number of runs a team scored by the end of the inning in 2008. For instance, no-out, bases-empty walk raises run expectancy by 0.379 runs, while the least damaging IBB (two outs, runner on second) raises run expectancy by "only" 0.129.

Of course, a key word there is "average." Those run expectancies are calculated looking at every batter all season, and intentional walks are used in very specific, presumably strategic situations when it benefits the pitching team, like with a star hitter at the plate and a much less dangerous hitter on deck or to set up a force out or double-play.

In Chapter 10 of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, the authors, Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andy Dolphin, examine this exact set of factors in detail (you can read the intro to the chapter here). The key outcome of their analysis is a table that lists all the different base-out-score situations in which an intentional walk may be advantageous for the pitching team and how much better the hitter must be than those coming after him to make it worth it to issue the walk. For instance, the table shows that with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, runners on second and third, and a tie score, an intentional walk may be issued if the hitter's wOBA is at least 23% better than the hitter in the on-deck circle.

My goal with this post is to identify which managers are the best (and worst) in their use of the intentional walk. Ideally, I would have factored in the base-out-score situation as well as the relative ability of the hitters at the plate and the on deck circle. However, the dataset I have from Baseball-Reference.com only gives us base-out-score situation for the 1310 IBBs issued in 2008. To look at hitters' wOBAs would require a whole lot more work that I don't have time for.

Still, as a starting point we can get a decently good idea of which managers are the worst in their use of the intentional walk by identifying the intentional walks that were issued in situations that are never advantageous for the pitching team. This way, we get a list of "maybe smart" IBBs and a list of "definitely not smart" IBBs. My assumption is that the managers who issue the most "definitely not smart" IBBs are probably not very smart in their use of IBBs overall. And indeed, with a whopping 233 walks issued "definitely not smart" situations in 2008, we have a pretty decent sample size to go on. (You can check out the database with the "maybe smart" and "not smart" IBBs noted on Google docs here.)

Here's the list of managers in 2008, ranked in order from most to fewest "definitely not smart" IBBs:

Bobby Cox	ATL	21
Jim Leyland	DET	17
Charlie Manuel	PHI	14
Cecil Cooper	HOU	13
Dave Trembley	BAL	10
Ozzie Guillen	CHW	10
Clint Hurdle	COL	10
Fredi Gonzalez	FLA	10
Bob Geren	OAK	10
Lou Piniella	CHC	9
Joe Torre	LAD	9
Ron Gardenhire	MIN	9
Willie Randolph/Jerry Manuel	NYM	8
John McLaren	SEA	8
Bob Melvin	ARI	7
Eric Wedge	CLE	7
Mike Scioscia	LAA	7
Ned Yost/Dale Svuem	MIL	6
Bud Black	SDP	6
Bruce Bochy	SFG	6
Ron Washington	TEX	5
Manny Acta	WSN	5
Terry Francona	BOS	4
Dusty Baker	CIN	4
Joe Girardi	NYY	4
Tony La Russa	STL	4
Joe Maddon	TBR	4
Trey Hillman	KCR	2
John Russell	PIT	2
John Gibbons	TOR	2

A few observations here:

• Manny stacks up pretty well. That's good, especially since he ranks so low on base-stealing.
  
• If you assume that the average intentional walk costs the pitching team something like 0.185 runs (in a 5 runs-per-game scoring environment, which is a bit higher than what we have now, the run value of an IBB is 0.198), Bobby Cox's 21 "definitely not smart" IBBs cost the Braves 3.885 runs, a little less than half a win. Considering that the Braves issued 80 IBBs total, it seems likely that Cox is costing his team as much as a full win per year with his aggressive intentional walks.
  
• You might be surprised that an AL manager (Jim Leyland) ranks so high on this list, given that pitchers don't hit in the AL and conventional wisdom would indicate that intentional walks to get to the pitcher are often smart. But really since managers will pinch-hit for the pitcher late in close games when intentional walks are most often an effective strategy, the actual win value of walking the pitcher is quite limited.
• You can see the number of total IBBs by team here. Interestingly, Manny is in the middle of the pack (14th of 30) on this list with 44 total IBBs. That means that Manny is using it and using it pretty well, while a manager like Trey Hillman has basically just eschewed the IBB altogether, issuing just 12 of them all year.