So Jim Riggleman did this thing
Runners on second and third, two outs, and Riggleman calls to IBB Jimmy Rollins to face Placido Polanco instead. Andy over at Baseball Reference has been blogging on this subject the last few days, and since he’s way smarter than I am, I’ll leave it to him to calculate win expectations in theoretical situations and determine times when it’s not totally daft to walk a dude on purpose. Also, yes, I realise the Nationals were losing 7-1 at that point and so it didn’t really matter what they did. Also, I realise the Nationals have like literally no pitching whatsoever, and so it really, really doesn’t matter what they did, since they’re going to lose a hundred games again anyway. But I’d like to point out this one thing.
When you’re facing -23 with 2 out, what do you need? You need an out. One single out. And Jimmy Rollins is the very easiest player to get out in all of baseball. Walking Jimmy Rollins to get to a damn thing isn’t really a good move there. The man OBP’d .296 last year, for pity’s sake. Polanco’s no great shakes, but he’s better than that. Looks like Polanco has 19 points of career OBP on Jimmy Rollins (they both look like ridiculous monsters this year, but that’s mainly because they’ve only played three games so far, and they were all against the Nationals, who, by the way, can’t pitch to save their left legs), which means he’s a meaningful amount harder to get out. Which isn’t to say that Polanco’s OBP is good — which it isn’t — but Rollins’s is really downright awful.
Andy goes into some theorising about why Riggleman may have done this — perhaps he was looking at batter/pitcher matchups, for example. I have my own theory: Jim Riggleman sucks. You know, at the managing. He’s afraid of Jimmy Rollins because he has grit and he hustles and gets hit with baseballs in crazy commercials (and also this picture), and so he walks him by rote because he’s a stupid yunker. Would Manny Acta have walked Rollins in that situation? I’m thinking not. And the Nationals still would have lost because they can’t goddamn pitch and he’d have gotten fired anyhow.
And I’d like to point out that Charlie Manuel sucks at the managing also, since his 1-2 hitters are goddamn terrible, and they’ll get more PA than anybody else on the team.
Postscript: Polanco hit a grand slam. Jimmy Rollins, surprisingly, didn’t manage to make even one single out on his way around the basepaths.
