Wrapping up the season's intentional walks

Over the course of the season I have been publishing a leaderboard for Joe Posnanski's Intentional Walk Rage Scale (IWRS). You can read the previous articles here and here. The basic idea behind the scale is that the intentional walk is a poor strategy in all but a very few situations and the IWRS provides an amusing way to identify the egregious (or reasonable) examples. Now that the 2014 regular season is complete we can update the IWRS leaderboard to look at the performance of this season's major league managers.

Here is a quick refresher on how the IWRS works. It involves assigning points to each intentional walk (IBB) based on the answers to the following six questions:

1. What inning was the walk in? 9^th inning or later: 1 point. Add 1 point for every inning before the ninth.
2. Did the walk bring up the opposing pitcher or a particularly weak hitter? Yes: 0 points. No: 3 points.
3. Did the walk give your team the platoon advantage or force the opposing manager to go to his bench? Yes: 0 points. No: 3 points.
4. Does the extra baserunner matter? Yes: 3 points. No: -1 point.
5. Are you setting up the double play to get out of the inning? Yes: 0 points. No: 3 points.
6. Are you intentionally walking someone solely to avoid a great hitter? Yes: 4 points. No: 0 Points.

The points are then summed to get the final amount of rage. The scale ranges from 0-25 with higher numbers indicative of more rage. Recall that this scale is not about second-guessing an IBB after observing the results of the next few plate appearances. This is about first-guessing the process of issuing an IBB.

Using the Baseball-Reference play index event finder I evaluated all of the intentional walks for the 2014 season. There have been 985, which continues a downward trend for the IBB: 1018 in 2013, 1055 in 2012, and 1231 in 2011. Cleveland issued the most (51) while the Royals issued the fewest (14), which keep Mr. Posnanski smiling. Victor Martinez (28) and Giancarlo Stanton (24) were given the most free passes this season.

As outlined in my previous articles, here is how I answered each of the questions listed above:

1. Straightforward.
2. Particularly weak hitters were those with an OPS+ lower than 55.
3. The platoon advantage was determined by looking at the on-deck batter's career splits against right- and left-handed pitching.
4. I assumed the extra baserunner mattered in all situations except for bottom of the 9^th inning (or later) of a tie game with a runner already on base (i.e., the winning run).
5. I assumed managers were setting up the double play in any situation with less than 2 outs and first base open.
6. This is the most subjective of the questions. I assumed managers were walking someone solely to avoid that hitter if questions 2,3 and 5 were all answered no, question 4 was answered yes, and the hitter is widely recognized as great (e.g., David Ortiz, Robinson Cano, Joe Mauer). There were a couple of exceptions to this rule. However, no half measures were taken in responding to this question. The IBB received 0 points or 4 points.

Here are some basic descriptive statistics for these IWRS data:

N	Mean	SD	Median	Min	Max
985	11.33	4.01	11	0	25

And here are the final IWRS data for the season, organized by manager (the table is sortable):

	Manager	Team	IBBs	IWRS Total	IWRS/IBB
1	Ned Yost	KCR	14	203	14.50
2	Lloyd McClendon	SEA	36	469	13.03
3	Bryan Price	CIN	33	420	12.73
4	John Gibbons	TOR	23	289	12.57
5	Bob Melvin	OAK	28	349	12.46
6	Ron Washington/Tim Bogar	TEX	43	533	12.40
7	Joe Maddon	TBR	27	330	12.22
8	Bo Porter/Tom Lawless	HOU	32	389	12.16
9	Mike Scioscia	LAA	41	494	12.05
10	Walt Weiss	COL	32	382	11.94
11	Rick Renteria	CHC	37	435	11.76
12	Brad Ausmus	DET	34	397	11.68
13	Robin Ventura	CHW	42	483	11.50
14	Don Mattingly	LAD	35	402	11.49
15	Buddy Black	SDP	32	365	11.41
16	Clint Hurdle	PIT	43	483	11.23
17	Terry Francona	CLE	51	564	11.06
18	Ron Gardenhire	MIN	24	260	10.83
19	Ron Roenicke	MIL	20	216	10.80
20	Mike Redmond	MIA	35	377	10.77
21	Mike Matheny	STL	35	375	10.71
22	Bruce Bochy	SFG	35	370	10.57
23	Fredi Gonzalez	ATL	36	380	10.56
24	Buck Showalter	BAL	25	260	10.40
25	Matt Williams	WSN	26	270	10.38
26	Kirk Gibson	ARI	43	434	10.09
27	Terry Collins	NYM	38	382	10.05
28	Ryne Sandberg	PHI	43	431	10.02
29	Joe Girardi	NYY	23	227	9.87
30	John Farrell	BOS	19	187	9.84

Sorting the data by IWRS/IBB shows a few interesting things. First, Ned Yost holds top spot, which is fitting given the rage scale was really created in his honour. Yet, this is unfair as he has actually issued the fewest IBBs. Yost just makes sure to issue particularly bad IBBs, which keeps him on top. Terry Francona issues many IBBs but manages to keep them reasonably low in terms of rage-worthiness.

Ron Roenicke joins Mike Matheny as a manager that issued a rageless IBB. In both cases the managers issued the IBB to set up a potential inning ending double play in the 9^th inning of a tie game on the road. Here are their efforts:

Date	Tm	Opp	Score	Inn	RoB	Out	IWRS
2014-04-02	STL	@CIN	tied: 0-0	Bot-9	-23	1	0
2014-09-18	MIL	@STL	tied: 2-2	Bot-9	-2-	1	0

Even more exciting news is that the quest to find the maximum rage inducing IBB is over. Robin Ventura did it! He asked Chris Sale (a legitimate top-5 Cy Young candidate) to walk Victor Martinez in the bottom of the 1^st inning, with 2 outs and J.D. Martinez on deck (a good right-handed hitter). This is remarkably anti-competitive. Unfortunately J.D. Martinez struck out, which will only serve to reinforce the decision in Ventura's mind.

Along with Ventura's gem, here are the other most rage-worthy IBBs from this season:

Date	Tm	Opp	Batter	Score	Inn	RoB	Out	IWRS
2014-09-24	CHW	@DET	V. Martinez	tied: 0-0	Bot-1	-2-	2	25
2014-04-18	SEA	@MIA	G. Stanton	down: 2-3	Bot-2	-2-	2	24
2014-06-11	CHC	@PIT	A. McCutchen	down: 2-3	Bot-2	-23	2	24
2014-06-28	OAK	@MIA	G. Stanton	ahead: 4-3	Bot-2	-23	2	24

If you have questions about the coding of the IBBs or suggestions for ways to examine things let me know in the comments below.

And again, thanks to Joe Posnanski for developing this interesting scale.

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You can have a look at the data here.

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All statistics courtesy of Baseball-Reference.

Chris Teeter is a Featured Writer at Beyond the Box Score. You can follow him on Twitter at @c_mcgeets.