The Phillies have added three key offensive players this off-season. Two of them are bad defensive players who don’t walk and the other is a good defensive player who doesn’t walk.
All three of them join a team that doesn’t walk anymore.
Here’s the walk rate for Phillie batters over the last ten years and the rank of that walk rate in the NL for that season:
| Year | BB% | NL Rank |
| 2012 | 7.4 | 15 |
| 2011 | 8.6 | 6 |
| 2010 | 8.9 | 4 |
| 2009 | 9.3 | 8 |
| 2008 | 9.3 | 5 |
| 2007 | 9.8 | 1 |
| 2006 | 9.6 | 2 |
| 2005 | 10.1 | 1 |
| 2004 | 10.0 | 2 |
| 2003 | 10.3 | 1 |
That’s obviously not going in the direction one would hope. In five of the last ten years, and every year from 2003 to 2007, the Phillies were first or second in the NL in walk percentage. In 2012, they were 15th in the league. The Rockies were the only team to walk in a lower percentage of their plate appearances than the Phillies.
In 2012, the team’s walk rate was down for the fifth year in a row (it’s actually 9.34% in ’08 and 9.29% in ’09).
And then the Phils added three guys that look likely to 1) play just about every day and 2) walk even less than the 7.4% of plate appearances that Phillie batters walked in 2012.
Even with the disappointment of 2012 and the playoff loses in ’10 and ’11, Amaro’s time as the GM of the Phils has been a success. The Phillies had the best record in baseball in 2011 and the best record in baseball in 2010. In 2009, they went to the World Series and lost to a better team.
So it’s been a good run.
What is true, though, is that the Phillies hitters have walked a whole lot less in the four years since Amaro has arrived than they did in the four seasons before his arrival.
Amaro became the team’s GM in November of 2008. Here’s the team’s walk rate over the four years he’s been at the helm (2009-2012) compared to the teams’ walk rate in the previous four seasons (2005-2008):
| Amaro years | |||
| Year | PA | BB | BB% |
| 2012 | 6172 | 454 | 7.4 |
| 2011 | 6279 | 539 | 8.6 |
| 2010 | 6291 | 560 | 8.9 |
| 2009 | 6338 | 589 | 9.3 |
| Total | 25080 | 2142 | 8.5 |
| Four previous years | |||
| 2008 | 6273 | 586 | 9.3 |
| 2007 | 6537 | 641 | 9.8 |
| 2006 | 6509 | 626 | 9.6 |
| 2005 | 6345 | 639 | 10.1 |
| Total | 25664 | 2492 | 9.7 |
In the four years since Amaro joined the team, the Phillies have averaged 535.5 walks per season. In the four years previous to 2009, they walked an average of 623 times a year. So they’re down about 87.5 walks a season on average since Amaro took over compared to ’05 to ’08.
Not to be forgotten in all of this is that, declining walk rate or not, the Phils led the NL in runs scored per game in 2009 and were second in 2010. In ’09, they led the league in runs scored per game despite having the eighth-best walk rate in the NL.
There’s a lot of differences between the ’09 and ’10 teams than the 2012 team, though. The biggest one is that the ’09 and ’10 teams won a whole lot of games and the 2012 team did not.
The walk rate of 7.4% for the Phillies in 2012 is really low. How low? If you run out of stuff to do this weekend, look up how long it has been since Phillie batters walked in 7.4% of their plate appearances or less. It might take you longer than you would have guessed.
February 1st, 2013 on 12:09 pm
The interesting combination of 2007 being the cutoff year and the Phils competing with the Rockies for worst walk rate got me thinking:
How much of this could be a result of hitting strategy for a particular ballpark? Would a hitting coach instruct players to be more liberal in chasing borderline pitches when the fences are shorter?
Do the home/away BB splits tell you anything?
February 1st, 2013 on 1:12 pm
I definitely don’t know. My initial reaction is to discount coaching, discount ballpark and just look at the players the Phillies have chosen to use in recent years and their histories of drawing walks. My guess is that the answer will prove to be simply that the Phillies gave a ton of PA to players who whose history showed they weren’t going to walk much and they didn’t walk much. See, for example, Pierre, Galvis, Frandsen, Polanco, Martinez, Wilson Valdez, etc.
I think the more interesting question is why the Phillies used players that don’t walk. Because they came cheap and the team had to? Because they thought they produced enough value defensively that they could still contribute enough overall to bring value to the team? The top hitters on the team have just gotten worse at drawing walks in combination with playing less? Something else?
I hadn’t even thought of home/away splits relative to walking. I will check it out in more depth, but in 2012, the Phils walked in about 7.6% of their PA at home and 7.1% away. 2011 they walked in about 9.12% at home and 8.04% on the road. I’m under the impression that just about all teams walk more at home than on the road, but I’m not sure by how much or even if that’s true. If it is, I don’t understand why.
February 1st, 2013 on 2:57 pm
Makes one look longingly back to that coarse wonderful old ’93 team. They’d wear pitchers out going deep into counts. Kind of makes one miss a recent but departed Phillies rightfielder. Kind of.
I respectfully have to take a bit of issue with crediting Amaro with this season of success. He was handed a World Series champion built by another man, was provided another man’s open checkbook, and on his own has accomplished less every year since taking over. There is a pretty good chance he will continue his downward arc in 2013. So yes, the baseball has been good. But it has also been in measurable decline. The decline is Amaro’s. the success belongs to others.
In my humble opinion.