7th inning stretch: "The Treatment".(intentional walks given by pitchers when the bases are loaded)

AS A TEENAGER IN 1944, EVERETT "ACE" Parker--now a retired New York City cop living in Napa, California--was at the Polo Grounds when Bill Nicholson was intentionally walked with the bases loaded. In later years, Parker often wondered how rare this phenomena, which he calls "The Treatment," was. Over the past decade, I have been working with him in documenting and mostly debunking stories of such occurrences. Parker wrote up our findings in "The Supreme Compliment," an article in the Society for American Baseball Research, 1997 The National Pastime. The ink was hardly dry on it when Parker turned on the TV to watch his local team, just in time to see Barry Bonds receive The Treatment from Arizona.

Parker and I, with help from others, have examined numerous other tales involving bases-loaded intentional passes, including alleged ones to Hugh Duffy (1893), Jimmy Ryan (1896), Babe Ruth (1919 and 1923), Mel Ott (1929), Joe Medwick (1937), Ted Williams (1939), and Willie McCovey. Each was either debunked or thrown out for lack of evidence. As far as we can determine, there have been only four instances of a batter being intentionally walked with the bases loaded:

Napoleon Lajoie, May 23, 1901--the Philadelphia Athletics were batting against the White Sex in the top of the ninth inning. They were behind, 11-7, but had the bases loaded and none out with Lajoie--on his way to a Triple Crown--at bat. Manager Clark Griffith inserted himself as relief pitcher and "calmly sent four wide ones across" to deliberately force in a ...