Wait, So If You Don’t Swing At Four Bad Pitches, You Get To Run The Bases?

The race is on, as the number of regular players who have yet to draw a walk in 2009 is down to three:

Yuniesky Betancourt (53 PA)
Bengie Molina (54 PA)
Ichiro Suzuki (33 PA)

Not surprisingly, considering that more than 20% of their starting lineup has yet to draw a walk, the Seattle Mariners are last in the major leagues with a .293 on-base percentage, barely falling below Arizona (.294) and Molina’s swing-happy San Francisco Giants (.299). (Point of interest: the Moneyball-inspiration Oakland A’s are next from the bottom at .307, which is certainly crappy, but the A’s look like the ’27 Yankees next to those other three dud-studded lineups).

Despite the Mariners’ unwillingness to take their bases on balls, unlike their impatient ilk they have been winning ballgames, entering Friday with a 3 ½ game lead on top of the A.L. West and having outscored their opponents by seven runs on the year. This scenario begets those two questions that drive all baseball research: how are they able to do this and can they continue?

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