If you’ve ever attended a youth baseball or softball game, I’m sure you have heard this expression, “a walk is as good as a hit”. While that is not always the case, a batter leading off an inning with a base on balls is as important to the team as his lining a base hit to centerfield. And nowadays, drawing that walk adds to the critical pitch count of the opposing pitcher. I remember my Dad telling me years ago when I was first learning how to keep score that I had the option of using “W” or “BB” on my scorecard. I told him that Pete Rose runs to first so why would I call it a walk. He smiled; it’s been a base on balls (“BB”) for me ever since.

In the early days of baseball, there was no such thing as a “ball”. Pitchers were instructed to make sure the batters hit the baseball. Since pitchers didn’t always comply, organized baseball soon began to penalize a pitcher for throwing three unhittable pitches and deemed it a ball. A pitcher was allowed only three “balls” per batter. In effect, it would take nine errant pitches to advance the batter to first base. By 1880 eight unfair pitches became a base on balls, and in 1884 six were required. It wasn’t until 1887 when the National League and its companion league, the American Association, actually agreed to a strike zone. In 1889, baseball finally mandated that four balls outside the strike zone would constitute a walk.

How many times do you find yourself grimacing when your favorite team’s pitcher walks a leadoff batter to begin an inning?! Statistics bear out the importance of it. A key metric in “The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball”, authored by three baseball historians, is “run expectancy”. The metric looks at the 24 possible baserunner/out scenarios, for example, bases empty with no outs. In that case, a team has a 46.1% chance of scoring a run in any given inning. When the leadoff batter walks, the run expectancy jumps to 83.1% and the anguish for the fielding team begins.

The success of a pitcher is often based on his strikeout to walks ratio, the higher the better. One of today’s superstar pitchers, Tarik Skubal of the Detroit Tigers, is a huge example. Skubal debuted with the Tigers in 2020 and last year had a season to remember. In an early May game against the Yankees, he became the first Detroit pitcher in over 100 years to strike out more than 12 batters and give up not one base on balls. His 2024 record was sterling, an 18-4 record, 2.39 ERA and 228 strikeouts, earning him the AL Cy Young award. This year he’s been even better. In ten consecutive starts, he compiled 89 strikeouts to just three walks, the first MLB pitcher ever to do that. He currently has a 14.14 to 1 strikeouts-to-walks ratio. You need to see him pitch to believe it.

Jacob deGrom, who now pitches for the Texas Rangers, still maintains the highest career strikeouts-to-walks ratio, at 5.3538. DeGrom pitched for nine seasons (2014-2022) with the Mets before joining the Rangers. He was an overnight success in 2014, winning the NL Rookie of the Year. This 4-time All-Star has led the National League in strikeouts (2018 and 2020) and won the NL Cy Young award in 2019. Often injury riddled, his career record is 90-59 with an ERA of 2.50. At the end of last season, he had the second lowest earned run average for pitchers with 1,000+ innings in the modern era. Jacob has been lights out this year as well. In his last ten starts, he has not allowed more than two runs, notching a 1.81 ERA during that span. His manager Bruce Bochy said this after a recent outing: “I’m a fan. I love watching him and what he can do with not just the stuff, but the command and his pitchability.” Control matters.

From a hitter’s perspective, success used to be measured simply by batting average, HRs, and RBIs, the latter two of course depending on the number of at-bats so far in any given season. It was a stat line that was easy for baseball fans to follow. If you read an article about any of today’s hitters, it all comes down to a player’s “slash line”. Slash line is batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage. The first two may be easily understood by the baseball novice, but slugging percentage needs an explanation. Slugging percentage measures a batter’s power by dividing total bases (for example, you get two bases for a double) by at-bats.

For me, the focus should be on-base percentage (OBP), which is the ratio of a batter’s times on base (hits, bases on balls, hit by pitch, but not reaching by an error) to at-bats. At-bats in this context does include official at-bats as well as well bases on balls, hit by pitch, and sacrifice flies. The point is that good batters are not always ones just slugging the baseball but also those who coax the base on balls for the good of the team. While OBP did not officially become an MLB statistic until 1984, the late Ted Williams, the Red Sox hitter thought of as the best of all time, has the highest career OBP with more than 3,000 plate appearances at .482. Williams led the AL in OBP for 12 seasons. Barry Bonds of Giants’ fame led the NL ten times. Currently, the Yankees Aaron Judge leads the 2025 season with a remarkable .493 OBP.

The scorecards we keep turn into box scores of a game, my favorite page in a newspaper by far. I must admit that I’m even more careful now in reviewing a box score for a game. You see, I no longer just check on how many hits a batter gets in a game or how many runs a pitcher gives up. I need to dig a little deeper. I want to know how many times a batter got on base and how many bases on balls a pitcher had. Those are the stats that really matter!

Until next Monday,

your Baseball Bench Coach