Jayson Stark has a piece on ESPN.com about intentional walks, and ideas to eliminate or reduce them. This comes from his (and others, I assume) belief that Barry Bonds walked too much over the last couple of seasons, and somehow this is ruining the game. He talked to both La Russa and Alderson about this, and they had interesting comments. From Alderson:

"First of all," Alderson said, "I don't totally agree that those intentional walks (in the World Series) created some kind of black hole of excitement. As I was watching those games, to me, there was a lot going on.

"You were always thinking about what happened with (Kenny) Lofton, what happened with (Rich) Aurilia and (Jeff) Kent, about what was going on ahead of Bonds. Obviously, it deprived people of the opportunity to see Bonds swing the bat. On the other hand, it created a lot of interesting strategic considerations, which I think most baseball fans would appreciate." No one, of course, appreciates a good strategic consideration more than a manager. But La Russa, whose team walked Bonds 10 times in only 21 trips during the NLCS, wasn't so sure he wanted to appreciate these particular considerations.

One intentional walk per player per game
This was a suggestion advocated by Giants owner Peter Magowan during the World Series: Just legislate a limit to how many times a team could hold up those four fingers every night. Sounds easy, right? Uh, not so easy.

"The biggest hole in that one," La Russa said, "is, you can walk a guy intentionally in an unintentional way. Just have the catcher sit out there and throw four sinkers in the dirt."

No one knows how many of Bonds' 130 "unintentional" walks last year were oozing with intent. But it was closer to 100 than zero. And most of them were so obvious, Darren Baker could have seen them coming. But "clearly," Alderson said, "there's an enforcement issue, having to distinguish between intentional and unintentional."

I think La Russa has it right. If you eliminate IBB, then teams will just carefully pitch around players like Bonds. Besides, I really don't think teams realize the huge penalty they are paying by walking Bonds so much. Any time you trade a runner for an out, you are putting yourself in the hole. And if you really want to see the IBB go down, Alderson has a great solution:

"And the way it stands now, the best solution with Bonds is just to find a better guy to hit behind him. And not just in the fifth spot, but in the fifth and sixth spot. That's how you make teams pitch to him. You don't have to change the rules."

The Giants, in fact, have spent their winter doing just that, adding Ray Durham, Edgardo Alfonzo, Jose Cruz and Marquis Grissom to deepen their lineup all around Bonds. And that's fine. That's what they could do about it, and they did it.