Milwaukee Brewers: Christian Yelich walks Brewers to top NL Wild Card

The Milwaukee Brewers honored their MVP candidate in their celebration after clinching a playoff spot on Wednesday evening, and all he had to do is take a stroll.

Still battling for a divisional title, the Milwaukee Brewers clinched at least the home-field NL Wild Card with a 2-1 win over the apparently fading St. Louis Cardinals. And they cemented at least one playoff game into place in the most 21^st century way possible. They took a walk in the park.

More precisely, their MVP-caliber outfielder, Christian Yelich, took five walks in the park called Busch Stadium and, following the second and third, scored the Brewers only two runs. While the Chicago Cubs held off the Pittsburgh Pirates, 7-6, the Brewers remained a half-game behind Chicago in the NL Central.

Yelich’s league-leading batting average (.321) did not move even .001, and perhaps some of the Brewers fans who had traveled to St. Louis were disappointed to see him only stroll to first base several times and score in the third and fifth innings on singles by Travis Shaw. That disappointment was probably allayed by the guarantee of a Brewers playoff game for the first time since 2011.

“‘Yeli’ did another thing tonight that was kind of amazing, in walking five times,” said manager Craig Counsell. If setting personal game records two at-bats in row, for his fourth and fifth walks, impressed Yelich, he chose instead to give credit to Shaw, saying his teammate “stepped up huge.”

To return to the subject of walks with a purpose, however, it should be noted that all three runs in the game were scored following walks. The Cardinals single tally followed Brewers starter Jhoulys Chacin losing his perfect game in the fourth inning by walking Matt Carpenter, who eventually scored on a sacrifice fly.

Yelich’s runs drove his run total for the season to 122, and surely that total has been helped by masterful plate appearances in which he has swung the bat successfully. Carpenter, however, has scored 108 runs, but is only hitting .259. Granted, he has also hit 36 home runs.

Brewers fans notwithstanding, the game really wasn’t that interesting except for fans deeply immersed in studies of the rise of the base on balls in MLB.

The Yogi Clemente Theory

The ever-growing importance of walks in professional baseball has been underway for about two decades now, based on what might be called the Yogi Clemente Theory. This notion is given the names of two Hall of Fame hitters, Yogi Berra and Roberto Clemente, who were both notorious bad-ball hitters. Indeed, Clemente sometimes looked as though he was throwing a 2-by-4 at pitches, but often he hit those pitches for singles at least.

The Yogi Clemente Theory states that these two players shouldn’t have swung at those bad pitches. According to modern thinking, these wonderfully talented hitters were “wrong, wrong, wrong.” Berra never walked more than 66 times in a season, Clemente never more than 56 times. Yelich’s high water mark in bases on balls was 80 in 2017 (63 this year to date); Carpenter’s highest walk total was 109 in ’17, and he may eclipse that figure this year.

For the ordinary modern player, Billy Beane was, therefore, correct when he made the observation that a walk is as valuable as a single and made the Yogi Clemente Theory law for Oakland A’s of 2002.

Sometimes this works out well for players. Carlos Santana of the Philadelphia Phillies now has a three-year contract worth a total of $60 million, and he got that contract in large part because he walks. However, his teammate, Cesar Hernandez, who has exceeded his high walk total this season by 27 and counting, with 93 free passes, is widely considered to have had a very disappointing season.

The MLB walk isn’t going away. It doesn’t make for terribly interesting games sometimes, but don’t call your Milwaukee Brewers friend to say that today.