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Reply to "Walks"

FoxDad posted:
roothog66 posted:
FoxDad posted:
Baseballcomesthird posted:

Very curious to see what you all have to say. Is a walk as good/equivalent to a hit?

From a defensive point a view, son's Legion coach was of the opinion walks tend to come back to bite you.  He absolutely hated it when a pitcher gave up a walk.  He'd rather the ball be put in play - at least the defense got a chance to make the out if the batter didn't strike out.

Yeah, but they don't hurt you like a hit. I'd rather my pitcher have a higher walk rate and low OBA than the opposite. With a guy on second, it takes three walks to bring him in, but only one hit.

Yes, a hit has the potential due to more damage - especially if it is a double, triple or HR.  At least the batter earned it and didn't get a free pass from the pitcher.  The batter that drew a walk wouldn't necessarily need 3 more walks to score.  If he can steal 2nd base, now he's in scoring position where a single could score him.  It's hard to score from 1st on a single.

It just seemed when my son was playing legion, that a walk resulted in a series of plays where multiple runs ended up scoring and many times when we looked back at the inning, getting the batter out instead of a free pass would have made a significant difference. 

True, but you're making a huge assumption that, instead of the walk, a better pitch would have resulted in an out and not a nicely grooved 3-1 pitch for a double down the line. It's frustrating, but impossible to reconstruct an inning replacing the walks with outs. Additionally, there are a lot of other factors, some of which you mention - can the runner you walked steal? Is your defense likely to hold him on a ground ball? Does the pitcher also have a tendency to throw a lot of wild pitches? Honestly, I've seen kids who rarely walk anyone with era's in double digits because they get rocked and pitchers who walk a lot of guys, but mostly strike out the batters they don't walk skate through inning after inning. The biggest problem with walks can be driving up the pitch count, but that also happens with high strike out rate pitchers as well. There's probably no easy answer to the question and it's easy as a coach to blame walks because we tend to assume that if our pitcher didn't walk that kid, he would have gotten the out.

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