You Have to Be Pretty Good to Be Really Bad: Walks
Kickin' it back to the old school
Let’s talk pitching. Pitchers aren’t nearly as dynamic as position players in the ways they can help (or hurt) their team. This was marginally less true when they still hit, but now that the DH is thankfully universal, pitchers live and die by their arms.
There are a few different ways a pitcher can allow a batter to reach base, but two of them account for the vast majority of baserunners: walks and hits. Today, I’ll start by talking about some pitchers who allowed a ton of walks.
Since I’m going by volume, none of these pitcher-seasons are going to be recent. I’m restricting this to post-integration1 seasons for several reasons,2 but even still, the difference between eras is massive. These days, you barely see people pitch 200 innings, let alone 300. Nobody wants to work anymore. For that reason, the record for most walks allowed in a season is 1000% unbreakable, but we can still learn something here.
Let’s start walking.
You Have to Be Pretty Good to Allow 150 Walks
There’ve been 17 pitcher-seasons since integration that included at least 150 walks and most of them were great.
You see a lot of repeat offenders here: Nolan Ryan did this five times in six years, Tommy Byrne did it three years in a row, and Bob Turley did it for the Orioles in 1954, then got traded to the Yankees and did it again in 1955.
From those three walkaholics (and especially from Ryan), we can see what it takes to succeed when you can’t find the strike zone. All three of these pitchers excelled at preventing hits and usually also at even allowing hitters to make contact.
This is what’s known as being effectively wild, an excellent podcast and a descriptor that applies to Nolan Ryan better than anyone in baseball history. Ryan is the all-time career leader in walks allowed, but he’s also the all-time career leader in strikeouts and in fewest hits allowed per nine innings, holding an insurmountable lead in all three.
And yet, somehow Ryan’s not the most interesting guy here.
In back-to-back years, Tommy “Wild Man” Byrne pitched two of the three seasons on this list with a below-average ERA- and the only two seasons on this list with negative WAR. He was somehow named an All-Star the first time he did it.
Tommy Byrne, 1950 Yankees
This wasn’t a 2008 Miguel Tejada scenario—one in which the player had a great first half and then turned cold as ice in the second. In 15 first-half starts, Byrne pitched to a 4.83 ERA with 102 hits and 79 walks in 108.0 innings. That is capital-B Bad. Except…
Tommy Byrne had a record of nine wins and three losses at the break, owing mostly to his team, the World Series champion Yankees, rolling out the second best offense in the majors. This was a thing that mattered back then.
We know today that Tommy Byrne was not a good or even pretty good pitcher in 1950, but the stats tricked most of the baseball world into thinking that he was, so he was allowed to be really bad.
His 1951 season was even more bizarre.
Tommy Byrne, 1951 Yankees and Browns
Byrne started the year in the Yankees rotation, where he’d been for the past two years, walking at least 160 batters in both seasons. This year was different, though. This year was worse. Tommy Byrne was ineffectively wild in 1951. The Yankees quickly demoted him to the bullpen.
It didn’t get much better there, and after outings of two walks without retiring a batter and then three walks and a hit batsman in a third of an inning, the Yankees traded him to the St. Louis Browns.
The Browns were terrible and needed pretty much any warm body to eat up innings down the stretch. That described Tommy, so they threw him into the rotation. In his third start as a Brown, he walked 11 batters in nine innings. That’s a lot of free passes, but it pales in comparison to what he did about two months later—what’s gotta be the wildest week and a half by any pitcher in baseball history.
On August 22, Byrne took the mound to face the Red Sox. In a game that went 13 innings, Byrne pitched 12 and two-thirds and allowed only three runs. That’s impressive! It’s even more impressive considering he walked 16 batters.
That’s tied for the most walks a pitcher has ever allowed in a major league game (and the only time it’s been done since integration, though it’s worth noting the Red Sox were not yet integrated at this point).
But that’s not all! After a rare relief appearance against the Senators on August 26 (two walks in one inning), his next start came two days later against his former team. If anyone knew not to swing the bat against him, it was the Yankees, and boy did they show it. Byrne was again tasked with pitching into extras, and this time he allowed 13 walks in 10 innings.
Only 11 times in the entire Baseball Reference database (and only five times since integration) has a pitcher allowed 13 walks in a game.3 Tommy Byrne just did it twice in a week.
His next start in Cleveland was an eight-inning complete-game loss in which he walked 10 more batters…
…bringing his totals in this 11-day stretch to 31.2 innings, 41 walks…and only nine earned runs. Effectively Wild Tommy was back!
And that is how Tommy Byrne walked 150 batters without even qualifying for the ERA title, not that he would have come anywhere close to winning it.
But, speaking of bad ERAs, Byrne does not have the worst 150-walk season according to ERA-. That honor goes to Joe Coleman.
Joe Coleman, 1974 Tigers
Joe Coleman is one of baseball’s forgotten innings-eaters—mostly because, for how many innings he ate, there were still quite a few others who ate more innings in a more efficient manner. In his prime, which I’ll define as the eight-year stretch between 1968 and 1975 in which he pitched at least 200 innings per season, he hurled a total of 2030.1 innings. If he’d done that in today’s eight most recent seasons, he would have led baseball by over 600 innings.
Back in the Nixon era, this didn’t even land him in the top ten.
Even if we restrict this to his four most gluttonous seasons—the stretch between 1971 and 1974 in which he pitched at least 280 innings per season—he only ranks eighth.
The first three of those seasons were good—great, even. From 1971-1973, Coleman posted ERA- figures of 89, 88, and 89 while being named an All-Star in 1972 and earning MVP votes in 1973. The last season was not good: ERA- of 113. It was also uncharacteristically wild.
Coleman was not known for walking a ton of batters; in his eight-year prime, he walked 3.47 batters per nine innings, which is more than average but not close to being an outlier. For comparison, Nolan Ryan walked 5.43 batters per nine innings over the same timespan. In 1974, though, Coleman walked a career-high 4.98 per nine, which worked out to a career-high 158 free passes over 285.2 innings. Even here, Coleman was overshadowed by Ryan, who walked 5.46 per nine over 332.2 innings for the 202 walks that rank second on this list.
It’s clear that Coleman was allowed such a long leash because his previous three consecutive seasons were so good. Coleman continued to regress in the years that followed, and less than two years after his 158-walk season, the Tigers cut bait with him by selling his contract to the Cubs.
In the grand scheme of things, Joe Coleman was not good enough to be really bad. Nolan Ryan was. As I mentioned earlier, Ryan holds the ironclad record for most career walks allowed. His 2795 walks tower over second-place Steve Carlton (1833) by almost a full thousand. But, stop me if you’ve heard this before: both of those pitchers are in the Hall of Fame, as are the rest of the top five pitchers in career walks.
Even back in the day, you had to be pretty good to be really bad!
Chapter 1: Strikeouts
Chapter 2: Double plays
Chapter 3: Caught stealing(s?)
Chapter 4: Walks
Chapter 5: Hits
To clarify, by this I mean “1947 or later”, even though only three teams—the Dodgers, the now-Guardians, and the Browns (now Orioles)—integrated that year. Many people forget that MLB was not fully integrated until 1959.
This is most obviously because the level of competition was not quite the same, but also because including all of baseball history gives us a bunch of seasons from the sport’s infancy, before walks were standardized.
When the concept of an unfair pitch, a “ball”, was introduced in 1863, nine were required for the batter to be awarded first base. They were also called without a consistent interpretation until 1887, when the strike zone was created, at which point the number required for a walk was still either six or seven depending on the league. The number was reduced to four in both major leagues in 1889, which caused walks to skyrocket leaguewide for a few years as pitchers adjusted to the new rules. That year, Mark Baldwin of the Columbus Colts set a major league record by walking 274 batters; not to be outdone, Hall-of-Famer Amos Rusie of the New York Giants broke that record a year later by walking 290, which still stands as the all-time mark today.
The most walks anyone has ever allowed in a post-integration season is 204, but that’s only tied for 18th on the all-time leaderboard. Of the 18 other pitcher-seasons with at least that many walks, only one of them occurred after 1898: Hall-of-Famer Bob Feller walked 208 batters for the now-Guardians in 1938.
Baseball Reference’s per-game coverage gets pretty iffy in the 19th century. We know of two other 16-walk games that aren’t listed by Baseball Reference, but both of them were in 1887, when walks were not yet standardized. The Baseball Reference table in the body of this piece is a good snapshot of the era in which all pitchers understood four balls to be a walk.