Baseball Chat

[basserdan]

MLB Is Eliminating The 4-Pitch Intentional Walk

This isn’t a big deal. And yet, in a way, it is.

by Al Yellon
Feb 22, 2017, 9:00am CST


Bryce Harper led the major leagues with 20 intentional walks in 2016 Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona — Just hours after Commissioner Rob Manfred said at Cactus League Media Day that there wouldn’t be any rule changes for 2017 in part because the MLB Players Association wouldn’t agree, this happened:

As part of its initiative to improve pace-of-game play, Major League Baseball has approved a change to the intentional walk rule, going from the traditional four-pitch walk to a dugout signal, team and union sources told ESPN's Howard Bryant.

Well. You know how I feel about this, as I wrote on this very topic two weeks ago:

Rob Manfred seems to have the misguided idea that because games sometimes run long, young people won’t be engaged with the sport. That’s not the reason young people sometimes roll their eyes at MLB. I can think of a number of reasons that they do, none of which have to do with intentional walks: the ham-handed way they treat young people who want to share video on social media, for example.

Lest you think I’m making a big deal out of this, I’m really not. I’m writing about this again because MLB has, in fact (at least according to the ESPN report) made this change, and it is thus news.

In the grand scheme of things the intentional walk isn’t a big part of baseball. In fact, it’s become a much smaller part over the last couple of decades. Here’s a year-by-year chart of IBB from 1990-2016:

Continued at:

http://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2017/2/22/14696900/mlb-eliminating-intentional-walk