OMG, He Walked Him?
Posted by Steve Lombardi on October 8, 2009
During last night's ALDS game between the Twins and Yankees, Mariano Rivera walked Nick Punto in the top of the 9th inning, with two outs, and the Yankees ahead in the game.
I doubt Joe Girardi was sweating Rivera issuing that walk, since the Yankees were up by five at the time, and, after all, it's Mo Rivera on the hill. But, in general, I would expect that it must kill a manager to see his "closer" issue a two-out walk in the 9th inning of a post-season game...when his team has the lead. This led me to wondering how often this situation happens. And, thanks to Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Post-Season Pitching Event Finder, the answer is easy to find. What I found interesting was the "leader board" for allowing 2-out walks in the 9th inning of a post-season game when pitching with a lead. Here it is:
Jason Isringhausen 4
Tom Henke 3
Mariano Rivera 3
Brad Lidge 3
Fernando Valenzuela 2
Rawly Eastwick 2
Armando Benitez 2
Red Ruffing 2
Granted, Rivera is high on this list partly because he's thrown in so many post-season games. But, still, it's interesting that he's issued this type of base-on-balls three times in his career - and is knocking on the door of becoming the all-time leader of doing this...er...for a lack of a better word..."sin."
In any event, Nick Punto now joins Bret Boone and David Justice as the only batters in baseball history to work Mariano Rivera for a 2-out walk in the 9th inning when their team was trailing. I guess that's something Punto can tell his grand-kids about someday...
October 8th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
[...] Dig it. [...]
October 8th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Valenzuela shouldn't be on this list as he only pitched one playoff game in relief, (he walked two batters, which is why he's on the list with a 2) and he worked the first two outs of the 8th inning.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SDN/SDN199610050.shtml
October 8th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
damthesehigheels -
Actually, it's this game that put Valenzuela on the leader board -
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MON/MON198110190.shtml
October 8th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Joe Tinker and Don Buford each succeeded twice in WS play to walk in this situation.
October 8th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Stop the presses! After you lay out the theme and stats comes this gigantic disclaimer:
Granted, Rivera is high on this list partly because he's thrown in so many post-season games.
Let's take a moment to chew that over. I've got Rivera with 34 post-season saves in his career. Let's take that as a rough proxy for how many times he's pitched in the 9th with a lead. (If anything that understates the total slightly; we haven't accounted for blown saves yet.) So he's walking a guy with 2 outs in at most 3/34th of the situations where that might occur. That's less than 9% of the time.
By contrast, Jason Isringhausen has 4 such walks -- which we will now call Deplorable Walks -- and 11 post-season saves. So he's at 36% of the time.
Henke has a mere 5 saves and 3 DWs. So he's at 60%.
I'm going to postulate than anyone whose Deplorable Walk number is over 20% isn't doing a good enough job of putting them away. But Rivera could walk the bases loaded in his next outing and still not be at that threshold. For now, he's getting the job done just fine.