What if they pitched to Bonds?

In his Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James addresses a fun scenario: What if Babe Ruth was surrounded by the worst team ever fielded - would it be worth it to walk him every time and deal with the rest of that horrid lineup? The results showed that even in this situation, walking the Babe all the time was a bad idea - the team scored something like 50 runs more when Ruth had a .000/1.000/.000 line. The hitter behind him hit .250 with 9 home runs and drove in 151 runs. The point is, walking guys is bad, m'kay?

This got me thinking about Barry Bonds and the early '00s, when he walked all the damn time, so I wondered how much opposing teams helped the Giants by walking him so much.

This article makes one huge assumption: that the walks Bonds took during his roiding years were all respect walks, from pitchers afraid to pitch to him. Given that his intentional walks jumped about 150%, and considering the reputation at the time (they pitched around him at the 2004 Home Run Derby), I don't think it's unfair to assume the vast majority of his walks were walks that he would not have gotten earlier in his career.

But, first things first: how much more did Bonds walk in his later years? Well, from his last year in Pittsburgh, 1992, through 1997, Bonds walked 19.6% of the time. Once he started juicing and GOATing hard from 2001-04, he walked in an insane 30.9% of his plate appearances. So, this article is going to assume that 11.3% of his plate appearances were simply forfeited by pitchers afraid to pitch to him.

This is where it gets interesting. I used Tom Tango's event values to find out how much Bonds was worth during this time (2001-04): with all of the walks, and everything as it actually happened, Barry Bonds created about 708 runs over the four years, or 191.5 runs per 155 games (yep).

Now, we take out those 'respect' walks, distributing them appropriately into all other outcomes. After removing the extra walks, we got an extra 300 events over the four years to put into things like home runs, doubles, and, most importantly, outs.

What I got was that Bonds created approximately 700 runs from 2001-04, or about 189 per 155 games. Not only was intentionally walking Bonds not helping, it actually hurt a bit, especially given one consideration:

A walk and an intentional walk are not the same thing. The former is worth 0.32 runs, the latter 0.18. The IBB is worth less because of situation - they are issued to set up double plays, when there is a runner in scoring position, etc. The walks issued to Bonds were worth more, because they were in atypical IBB situations; he was famously walked by Buck Showalter in 1998 with the bases loaded - that move was obviously worth more than 0.18 runs. Bonds probably made several runs per year based on the difference in his intentional walks. 

So,  no, the difference isn't as shocking as James's example with Ruth, but we're not talking about walking every time with scrubs surrounding him, either. In short - don't walk guys more than you have to.