The history of the walk

[The Gray Eagle]

Joe Posnanski has a really interesting article on the history of the walk.
https://joeblogs.joeposnanski.com/p/a-brief-history-of-the-walk

The pitcher is called that because in the early days of baseball, they really did pitch the ball, underhanded, like horseshoes. One of the very first rules of baseball — one of the 20 original Knickerbocker Rules adopted in 1845 — was “The ball must be pitched, not thrown, for the bat.”
This is a key thing to remember for today’s entry: A brief history of the walk.

Walks have not always been part of baseball.

In the beginning, there were no walks, because there were no called balls. The idea of called balls was repellent to early baseball people, because in those days the pitcher was supposed to be almost superfluous. The whole pitcher’s job was to start the action by throwing the ball “for the bat.” The battle was between the hitter and the fielders.

I never had any idea that there were so many pitches in the old days. It's inconceivable now.

Baseball at-bats could take FOREVER in those days. Pitchers did not like being told they had to give batters the perfect pitch. And hitters would wait for that pitch for as long as it took. According to perhaps the most remarkable baseball research ever done — Peter Morris’ epic, two-volume A Game of Inches,* — at-bats would routinely go 50 or 60 pitches and often more. Morris quotes William J. Ryczek’s research that in an 1860 game between the Atlantics and Excelsiors, pitchers Jim Creighton and Mattie O’Brien threw a combined 665 pitches in THE FIRST THREE INNINGS.

Yeah, ask pro players to put fair play ahead of winning, how did that turn out?

At first, sportswriters and baseball leaders — particularly the Father of Baseball, Henry Chadwick — tried to play upon the players’ sense of fair play and asked pitchers to stop purposely tossing the ball out of the zone and asked hitters to stop just waiting around for the perfect pitch. This sort of morality play didn’t work any better in the 1860s than it would now; players and managers and executives in total want to win too badly to just do the right thing out of some sense of duty.*
*I realize many people don’t agree with me, but this has always been my big problem with focusing entirely on players who used PEDs when the game at large turned its back. No, they shouldn’t have done it. But even the most rudimentary study of baseball history — and human history — tells you they would. As Buck O’Neil so vividly said, “The only reason we didn’t use ’em is because we didn’t have ’em.”

Sounds like umps haven't changed much.

In any case, once it became clear that pitchers could not be guilted into throwing the ball over the plate and hitters could not be guilted into swinging at a pitch that was even one millimeter off their spot, the “called ball” was invented. This was meant to do one thing and one thing only: Stop the pitcher from stalling.
The called ball was so controversial at first that nobody was even entirely clear how many balls had to be thrown to send a batter to first base. At first, it technically took three balls to draw a walk, but in practice it took many, many, many more because the umpire was supposed to give the pitcher any number of warnings before even calling the first ball. How many warnings? Well, that was apparently an individual umpire's decision; there were some umpires who would NEVER call a ball unless they felt like the pitcher was purposely stalling (the same was true of strikes, but we’ll save the history of the strikeout for another entry). And there were other umpires, call them Angel Hernandez’s if you wish, who would call balls with abandon, even if the ball was rather obviously in the zone.

The 1888 season, however, was a slog. Pitchers dominated the game. The whole league hit just .239. Almost 40% of the runs scored that year were related to defensive errors. The Philadelphia Inquirer complained about “the growing tendency of ball playing to degenerate into a ‘pitcher’s battle,’ in which pure science takes the place of skill in handling the bat and fortune in chasing the fly ball. Various suggestions have been made looking to a change whereby the audience may be given more sport and the monotony of ‘one-two-three-out’ be more frequently interrupted.”

In other words, the fans wanted more balls in play.
This was 125 years ago.

I kind of like this idea for a rule:

St. Louis sports editor Sid Keener, who in 1937 made various suggestions to enliven the game, one of those being a new rule which would allow any batter who receives a walk on four pitches to decline the walk and just step back in the box for a new plate appearance. If walked again — intentionally or unintentionally — he would be allowed to go to second… or he could decline the walk again and try a third time.
“The fence-buster may be passed,” Keener said. “The weaker batter, however, is not accorded a similar privilege. He cannot demand a new pitcher.”

 

[zenax]

One thing not mentioned was that the National League allowed the batter to call for a high pitch or a low pitch until 1887, with the strike zone being above or below the waist (top or bottom of zone determined by the umpire). Batters also got four strikes.

 

[wade boggs chicken dinner]

It sure would have changed history if someone had said, "Instead of using balls and strikes and an umpire, why don't we just make the pitcher on the same team as the batter and the batter gets up to seven pitches to hit."

 

[teddywingman]

It's kind of miraculous how the game changed so fast between the mid 1880's to the mid 1890's, where the game we know become solidified with pitchers like Amos Rusie and Cy Young.

 

[santadevil]

Well, add another book to the collection to buy