ESPN.com: MLB – Angels to challenge Bonds in evenly matched Series
I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but I’ve spent much of that last week arguing with friends about the meaning of the way we judge a team’s ability based on the components of runs scored. And the fact that seems to be unassailable is that the past two years the Giants have scored fewer runs than we would have predicted given their component stats.
My friend Alex Patton suggested that this is because an intentional base on balls is truly worth less than a regular base on balls, and looking at the Giants’ numbers the last two years (when they led the major leagues in IBB) it’s hard to argue with that. It’s especially hard to argue when you look at the other teams that drew lots of IBB, and see that they too didn’t score as many runs as you would expect.
The Giants won the first game of the series tonight and I tend to believe that they will beat the Angels handily, though I can’t find any good statistical reason to think that. And the most powerful evidence I have about this series is that the Angels should walk Bonds in all but the most benign situations.
Rob Neyer and most sabremetricians disagree. But I think that’s because they see a walk as a walk, rather than truly evaluating the rather singular role Bonds plays in the Giants’ offense. If the Angels decide to pitch to Bonds they have to hope that he doesn’t reproduce his productive stats from 2001-2002.
If they walk him they have to hope that they can contain Benito Santiago and JT Snow. They couldn’t contain Snow last night, but I think their best chance is going after the guys who hit after Bonds.
Of course, they also have to hit the Giants’ pitching, but no matter what else they did, they’d have to do that anyway.
Giants in five.