In the "Comments" section of the Elden Auker tracer, reader DJ_Man mentions that Auker also faced Joe DiMaggio in the middle of his 1941 hitting streak, and gave up a hit to the previously hitless DiMaggio in his final at-bat, preserving the streak. My "Comment" on his "Comment" questions if the intentional walk in that situation would have been the right call, and I’d like to elaborate on that question a bit longer here rather than in a further "Comment" in the "Aukward Memories" article.
The case has been made, by Bill James most prominently, that most IBBs backfire—they prolong innings, the batter walked often comes around to score, and the IBB results in more runs, not fewer, being scored overall. Designed to prevent runs, IBBs mostly help runs being scored, and have historically been overused by over-clever managers.
While I agree with this blanket statement, I also think there are obvious exceptions to adopting it as a strict rule, and the DiMaggio-Auker encounter on June 26, 1941 is one of those. ( https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA194106260.shtml is the box score and play -by-play.) A general observation is that if you’re facing Ruth or DiMaggio and the next batter is a weak-hitting pitcher with no pinch-hitters left on the opposing bench, the IBB is the smart play, but we’re not talking about no-brainers here, just the other 99% of potential IBB situations.
Leaving aside the whole question of DiMaggio’s hitting streak for a moment, let’s just look at the game situation here: the Yankees lead 3-1, there’s a man on second and two out in the bottom of the eighth inning. The Yankees’ pitcher is Marius Russo, their most effective starter that season, and Russo is especially effective on this day: through the first eight innings he has held the Browns to one hit (a home run) and he has low walk and strikeout numbers, so he almost certainly has a low pitch-count for the day (not that anyone was tracking pitch counts in 1941, but Russo looks from the box score to be far from exhausted. In the whole nine innings, Russo faced only 28 batters.) So the Browns are facing an uphill battle: if they can hold the Yankees to a scoreless bottom of the eighth, they must score two runs off Russo in the top of the ninth just to tie the game.
The one thing they DON’T want to do is to make their uphill battle even steeper. The odds of tying the game at the point that Joe D. steps up to the plate are pretty long, to begin with: Baseball-reference.com puts the probability of a Yankee win at 93%. When DiMaggio hit a double off Auker, that increased the odds by an additional 4%. In other words, the RBI on DiMaggio’s hit more than doubled the improbability that the Browns could win the game.
Every succeeding Yankee run would have added to that improbability, of course, but strategically, I think the Browns’ best chance was to do ANYTHING they could, as Joe D. stepped up to the plate, to stop that fourth run (the man on second base) from scoring and thus cutting their slim chances in half.
And of course it does matter that it’s Joe DiMaggio stepping up to the plate. If you’re ever going to walk anyone intentionally, I’d imagine "a power hitter with a hit streak on the line and an open base" would be the man. But even with a weaker hitter at the plate, the intentional walk seems like a decent option in this spot.
Why? Because I don’t think the batter scoring is what you need to be thinking about. If that happens, the man on second base will have already scored and your odds of winning the game have already been cut in half. Better, I think, to walk the batter, almost any batter, and create a force-play situation at any base. It’s not very likely but if the batter following DiMaggio (Charlie Keller, in this case) were to hit a slow roller to second or third base, your only play might be to get the runner out by stepping on the bag. But with DiMaggio at the plate, an intentional walk seems even smarter than with any old batter at the plate.
Aside from the strategic considerations of the game-situation, though, there is the reality that it is Joe DiMaggio at the plate. We now know that he did hit a double, did knock in a run, did increase the Yankees’ chances of a victory by 4%--but I believe that the odds were overwhelmingly in Elden Auker’s favor in that spot. Why?
Because Auker knew, absolutely knew with certainty, that DiMaggio would be swinging at any pitch he would throw in the general direction of home plate. In that spot, with his hit streak on the line, the one metaphysical certitude that Auker could have was that DiMaggio was NOT looking for a streak-killing walk. DiMaggio would swing at anything Auker threw up there.
It’s not even a bad strategy for DiMaggio to swing at anything—the Yankees were, after all, already 93% certain they would win the game no matter what he did at that point, and everyone was rooting for him to extend his streak. No teammate would resent DiMaggio for putting his own personal goals above those of the team, because the team had pretty much accomplished its goal, winning the game, already.
But it is a bad strategy, just in terms of getting Auker to throw the ball over the plate. Normally, any batter’s strength is the knowledge that the pitcher does not want to walk him. In this spot, however, everyone in the ballpark, including DiMaggio and Auker, knows that DiMaggio will not be happy with a walk, and that Auker is not threatened in the least by the possibility of walking DiMaggio.
Auker’s best move is to figure out where DiMaggio least wants the ball to be pitched—high and away? low and inside?—and to put it at least four inches off the plate in whatever spot that is.
Now, maybe DiMaggio gets a hit anyway. Maybe he swings at a pitch way off the plate and sends it into left field. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. I don’t know.
But I think not. I think Auker, out of a sense of "sportsmanship," did throw a pitch where DiMaggio could get it. According to Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of DiMaggio, he hit Auker’s first pitch, a low inside fastball, on a hop over the third-base bag for a double down the line. (DiMaggio said it was the "hardest-hit" ball of the entire streak, but Cramer thinks he may have meant it was the hardest hit to get, and I agree with that interpretation.) So it’s possible that Auker did exactly what I’m suggesting he should have done, to put the ball in an impossible place to hit it, and DiMaggio hit it anyway.
What’s more likely, though, is that Auker was working needlessly close to home plate in an attempt, as I said, to give DiMaggio a sporting chance to extend his streak.
If so, Auker was putting DiMaggio’s streak above his own team’s chances at tying up and winning the game, however long those odds were at that point. Be it far from me to go all Herm Edwards on your ass (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W42iiCcFbxE ) but you play to win the game, not to give the other guy a shot at extending his hitting streak.
Who, after all, endangered DiMaggio’s hitting streak? The answer is: DiMaggio did. By failing to get a hit earlier in that game, DiMaggio created the game situation where Auker knew, in the purest epistemological sense, that he was forced to swing at anything Auker threw him, up to and including the kitchen sink.
Say that Auker had done the unthinkable, and simply walked DiMaggio intentionally, thrown four pitches six feet off home plate. Would that have been poor sportsmanship? You might think so, but I think it’s just good gamesmanship, taking advantage of a strategic ploy designed to increase his team’s chances of winning the game. In fact, I’d go so far to say that throwing a pitch over the plate, if that’s what Auker did, cheapens DiMaggio’s accomplishment. The whole idea behind a hitting streak is that DIMaggio’s opponents are trying, above all, to beat his team at all times, and not that they’re willing accomplices in extending his hit streak.
Suppose that Auker had gotten DiMaggio out, and the Yankees led by two runs in the top of the ninth, with DiMaggio’s hitting streak over. Well, technically, it’s not quite over, because the Browns could score exactly two runs in the top of the ninth, and the game could go into extra innings, giving DiMaggio any additional number of at-bats. Would you want the Yankees to allow the Browns to score exactly two runs, (risking, of course, losing the game) and then to make three deliberate outs in the bottom half of the ninth, just to create opportunities for DiMaggio to extend his streak?
Of course you wouldn’t. But that’s where logic leads you, if you think Auker’s decision to pitch to DIMaggio in the eighth inning was the right one. He had DiMaggio exactly where a pitcher wants a batter, needing to expand his strike zone to infinity, and he chose not to take maximum advantage of this rarity.
It is a rarity, applying only to hit streaks, and other personal achievements. The only other comparable situation I can recall took place in the game that ended Pete Rose’s hitting streak, against Gene Garber. As you will remember, Garber took some heat from Rose for trying so hard to get him out. "He pitched me like it was the seventh game of the World Series," Rose complained (or words to that effect). https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-01-sp-61675-story.html He was furious that Garber, an off-speed specialist, refused to throw him fastballs over the plate that would challenge him to get a hit, but instead threw him a changeup on the corner to strike him out. Again, who put Rose in the situation of needing to swing at anything, and avoid a walk at all costs? Hint: his initials were not GG.
Imagine a ninth-inning situation where the score was tied, bases loaded, and the pitcher goes 3-0 on a batter. Normally, it is incumbent on the pitcher to throw a strike, right? To do otherwise is to walk in the winning run, so here the advantage is the batter’s. He knows the next pitch is going to be hittable, and if it isn’t right where he wants it, he can lay off, because a 3-1 pitch doesn’t put the pitcher in a much more favorable situation. He is also going to be delighted in that spot if the ball is outside of the strike zone, because that would mean his team wins the game, he gets the winning RBI, and everyone gets to go home deliriously happy with the results.
But what if that batter is DiMag or Rose or Willie Keeler with his hitting streak on the line? Who has the advantage in that spot?
If you're the pitcher, are you going to throw your best fastball down the center of the plate challenging Joe or Pete or Willie to do his worst? Or are you going to try to hit a corner knowing that he might be tempted to swing because he needs a hit to extend the streak? Or do you throw off the plate, thinking that the batter may swing at a bad pitch? If DiMaggio or Keeler is at the plate, I'm pretty sure, as is Herm Edwards, that he lets a wide pitch go by and takes the walk and takes the win and ends his streak gladly. If it's Rose, I’d bet he swings at ball four. Depending on the odds my bookie gives me, of course.