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The Curse of the Intentional Walk
By STAN ISAAC
of TheColumnists.com
Sometimes the baseball mentality is the sport’s own worst enemy. Witness an incident in one of the Philadelphia Phillies games the last week of the season that was all too typical an example of baseball eating its own.
The Phillies, who were still in contention in the race for the wild card, were playing the Florida Marlins, whose slim hope for a playoff spot was wiped out just before the last week of the season.
So, in a game that had no meaning for the Marlins a situation developed. The teams were tied, 1-1, in the third inning when the Phils’ home run slugger, Ryan Howard, came to bat with two out and a man on third base. The Marlins chose to walk Howard and pitch to the slumping Pat Burrell. On this occasion Burrell made the Marlins pay by hitting a three-run homer, giving the Phils a 4-1 lead that propelled them to a thumping 14-2 victory. Justice for the Phils triumphed in this instance.
The Marlin strategy, however, robbed anew a chance for Howard to hit a home run. This had happened time and again the last three weeks of the season. In some games he was walked intentionally twice. Up to then Howard was the hottest hitter in baseball. His pursuit of various home run records lit up the sport, first in Philadelphia and then all over the country.
Between Aug. 23 and Sept. 8 Howard hit 11 home runs in 12 games to stand at 57 home runs. This put him in position to tie or beat several records. He threatened the record of the legendary Jimmie Foxx of the Athletics--58 homers, the most ever by a Philadelphia player. More significant, he had a chance to tie and even top the mark of 61 homers set by Roger Maris in 1961 that stands now as the most home runs in a season by a player not tainted by suspicions of drug use.
Had Howard hit 62 home runs, he could rank as the all time home run king over the drug-tainted Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who hit more than 61, but whose achievements are tainted by the suspicion they were juiced by the use of steroids.
From just about that point on, though, the 26-year-old Howard ran into the bugaboo of intentional walks. For fear that he might hit those home runs, the opposition pitched to him carefully, not giving him anything to hit, or worse, gave him intentional walks, taking the bat out of his hand. As the intentional walks increased, his total went up to 37, behind only two players in drawing intentional walks in a season.
Now then, intentional walks are a legitimate part of baseball strategy. But they are meaningless when applied by a team that is no longer in contention. Howard’s pursuit of home run records should have had priority over the out-of-contention Marlins or, earlier, the last-place Washington Nationals, winning insignificant games.
The Marlins, managed by Joe Girardi, and the Nationals, managed by Frank Robinson, played it straight and stupid. There were even instances when Howard was walked intentionally even though it meant moving a runner from first base into scoring position at second base. This could be considered acceptable, if daring, strategy if the game meant something to the opposition, but it didn’t. So the Philly fans and the nation of aware baseball fans had, in a sense, the bat taken out of their hands.
This is a time when baseball has competition from all other sports. This time of year in particular the Phils are overshadowed in the Philadelphia media by the Eagles and pro football developments. At the height of Howard’s pursuit, the Phillies actually achieved parity in coverage in Philadelphia. Howard was The Man.
The intentional walks eventually had their
deadly effect. Howard’s hot bat cooled off and he hit only
two home runs in his last 19 games. He hit a wall at 58 home
runs. And the Phils were eliminated from playoff contention the
next to last day of the season.
If the managers of the hapless Marlins and Nationals didn’t
see the excitement-to-baseball factor in allowing Howard a chance
to hit home runs, then the commissioner of baseball should have
given out the subtle message that the sport had in its grasp
a bigger story than winning meaningless baseball game.
For sure commissioner Bud Selig’s office had a hand in the Phillies and Nationals waiting out a four-and-a-half hour rain delay in Washington before starting their scheduled last meeting of the season. Had the game not been played and the Phils needed that game to count in the end-of-the-season pursuit of the wild card, the regular season would have been extended. That would have interrupted playoff plans, so the commissioner exerted muscle.
Too bad Selig didn’t use that clout to help fuel what could have been the Howard Home Run Saga of 2006. Baseball is a sport, yes, but it is also an entertainment. Home runs? That’s entertainment!
There was a wackiness to that four-and-a-half-hour rain-delayed game that involved, among others, two young men from Philadelphia, Phil Ianieri and Mike (The Other) Schmidt. They had bought tickets for the game a month earlier and drove down to Washington for the game.
“It wasn’t so bad waiting,” Ianieri said. “They put the action of the other games on the scoreboard while we waited, By the time the game got started, I guess there were only about 500 fans in the stands. Most of them were college kids from Philly who were going to schools in the Washington era.”
The Phils lost, 3-1, one of the three losses in four games at the end of the season that doomed them. “We didn’t get back to Philly until five in the morning,” Ianieri said. And he smiled.
©2006 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo of Ryan Howard
is courtesy of the Philadelphia Phillies. This column first posted
Oct. 2, 2006.
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