Walks and Hit Batsmen
Because walks have not fluctuated greatly over time, the math on Walks plus Hit Batsmen is not a lot different now than it was when we went through this before. The worst team ever for walking people was the 1915 Philadelphia A’s.
In 1914 there was an upstart league, the Federal League, which had lured a good number of players out of the American and National Leagues. Connie Mack in 1914 had the best team in the American League, but he was not able to pay his players what they could earn in a competitive market. He didn’t really make a "decision" to sell his star players; he had no choice. He didn’t have the money to keep them. Mack was not all that rich. He was kind of operating on a shoestring.
Mack’s star players almost all liked Mack or loved him, but they also liked money. His players were going to go to the Federal League to get paid. Mack sold his best players to the other teams in the American League to protect his investment in an American League team.
This left Mack, in 1915, with a team that finished 43-109. It was barely a major league team, and a lot of the players there were not major league players. He had a bunch of teenagers and young players with little minor league experience. They were bad at everything, generally, but one of the things they were REALLY bad at was, they gave up a lot of walks. His pitchers walked 827 batters and hit 57 with pitches, a total of 884 free passes.
The theory of this measurement system is that 5 standard deviations worse than the average is such a terrible performance level that no team would reach it, but the 1915 A’s actually did. The average number of walks + hit batsmen per batter faced is .084 022; essentially, one batter out of every 12 will draw a walk or be hit with a pitch. The standard deviation is .012 209. Five standard deviations worse than the norm is .145 067, or essentially one batter in seven.
The 1915 Philadelphia Athletics faced 5,777 batters. If you multiply that by .145 067—the zero-value level—you get 838. Their walks + hit batsmen was 884. They "walked" 46 batters MORE than the zero-performance level. They are the only team in major league history which was worse than five standard deviations below the norm in walks.
That should not happen, but I can’t move to six standard deviations above the norm just to avoid this one weird case; that would cause bigger problems than it would solve. What I did instead was, I created a rule that any team, no matter what their data is, is credited with at least 50 "walks not issued".
The reason that you have to have that rule is that, while the overall quality of the team’s control was sub-zero, not EVERY pitcher on the team would be sub-zero. SOME pitchers on the team would still, individually, have some control, get some credit for not walking batters. Later on, we’ll divide up the credit for the team to individual pitchers. Those pitchers have to get credit for what they have done. If you don’t leave anything on the ledger, then there is nothing to be assigned to the individual pitchers later on. So we have to put in a minimum.
It’s just a weird situation; it only applies to three teams in the history of baseball. The three teams which stray over the zero-value line in one category or another were all more than 100 years ago—the 1915 A’s, the 1900 New York Giants, and the 1901 Baltimore Orioles. There are 2,550 teams in the study and 7 categories; we’ve got 18,000 category measurements. One in 6,000 is a case like this, where we will have to bend our rules.
On the other end of the walks scale is a team that wasn’t very good, either; the top two teams for NOT walking anybody are the 1932 Cincinnati Reds (60-94) and the 1933 Cincinnati Reds (58-94). That team played in a huge ballpark where there were basically no home runs, so they just put the ball in the strike zone and let people hit it.
In general, good control DOES correlate with team success. Good teams walk fewer batters than bad teams. That Cincinnati team is an exception to the rules. It’s a wild animal; that’s why we have the cage.