Well, there's always Mark Bellhorn (88 BBs).

It seems like a lot of speedy lead off hitters utilize the bunt a lot more then I remember. Alex Sanchez took this to excess, hitting a hollow .322 with a strikeout to walk ratio of 50/7. Of course if you're bunting from the get go, you're usually not taking any pitches.

I don't have any concrete evidence, but I just don't remember players in the 1980s trying to bunt themselves on as much as some of the faster players do now.

You don't walk off the island!

Dwight Evans, Darrel Evans, Mickey Tettleton - terrific players, almost completely forgotten. Meanwhile Jim Rice gets a bunch of HOF votes every year.

It's just human nature.

I've got to think that some of the reduced walk totals for certain high walk hitters is a result of pitchers going after them more aggressively. All part of the equillibrium-seeking process we'll be seeing more of as sabrmetric approaches become more prevalent across the league.

At first I thought it might simply be a fluke of distribution, that AL pitchers were allowing as many BB per inning as NL ones, and that the distribution of BBs by hitter was just highly compressed, to an exaggerated degree. (This would be a good matter for in-depth statistical analysis, BTW.)

A cursory glance suggests otherwise. Not only are the top 10 hitters in terms of total BB in 2004 all National Leaguers, but 6 of the top 7 pitchers in terms of BB allowed are NLers (the 7th being Victor Zambrano, who got traded to the NL).

This may in fact reflect something deeper, an emergence of a fundamental difference of strategy in the AL vs the NL.

I note that the first Moneyball teams have all emerged from the AL (with the sole exception of LA starting this year): Oakland, Boston, Toronto... These teams' offensive strategies revolve strongly on the amassing of walks as hitters, and the prevention of BBs as pitchers. In fact, any potential increase in BB on the hitting side of these teams may be more than offset by a decrease in BB on the pitching side.

Is it possible that AL teams are now increasingly:

a) recruiting pitchers with low BB rates? Surely the Moneyball teams are conscious of this and responding in turn. This may be making more of a market for this among other AL competitors as well.

b) encouraging/coaching pitchers ever more to pitch strikes and allow contact? This was an expressed strategy on the part of the KC pitching/coaching staff (also used to a lesser extent by Cincinnati in the NL)...

I still think it's interesting that Chavez added so many more walks this year (plus didn't he do much better against left-handed pitching too?). Is it finally the result of listening to his coaches? Or just a fluke? Hopefully not as an A's fan! :-)

After he came back from his injury, Ray Fosse (A's TV color) asked Chavez why he was hitting lefties so much better this year. He said, approximately "It's funny, Giambi told me the secret years ago: sit on the breaking ball. I don't know why I couldn't do it before. I guess I've 'matured' or something." I suspect the walks come from a similar place (i.e., getting more comfortable in deep counts). On a purely anecdotal level, though, I thought that the volume of truly outlandish Guerrero-esque HRs on balls nowhere near the strike zone was way down.

Well, hopefully, Chavez's "maturity" will carry over to next season then :-) I didn't get to as many A's games as I would have liked, so I didn't notice (anecdotally or otherwise) a decrease in Chavez's outlandish HRs. I do remember one from a few years ago against the Mariners' Sasaki in the bottom of the 9th. It wasn't just that he hit the ball with what seemed like a one-handed stroke, but he didn't even seem to step into his swing -- and he still hit it out!

Nah, AL hitters would have gotten a ton of walks this year, but back in May, the O's canned Mark Wiley and brought in Ray Miller as pitching coach for their young (and wild!) staff.