Archive for strikeouts

In 2017, the fastball rate fell again. It’s been falling for some time now, but in 2017 it fell again, from 56.7% in 2016 to 55.6% last year. There’s some reason to think that the drop in the fastball rate is linked to the increase in baseball’s increasing swinging-strike rate, which in turn is linked to the rise in strikeouts and hit batsmen, and on and on and on. Baseball is a complex system of action and reaction, and small changes can grow large quickly.

So this year, I want to know: what do you think will happen to some of baseball’s key stats, league-wide, in 2018? Maybe you think home-run rates will go up and strikeouts will fall. Maybe you think if home-run rates go up then strikeout rates have to fall. Maybe you think it’s the other way around. I don’t know. But I want to hear from you, and most of all I want to hear why you think certain changes are linked, and others aren’t.

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It shouldn’t be news that strikeouts have increased at a pretty alarming pace over the last decade. From the end of the last strike through 2007, the league-wide strikeout rate was pretty steady, averaging 16.7%. That is, roughly one in every six plate appearances ended in a strikeout. Over the last decade, the average has reached nearly 20%, including a high of 21.6% this year. Now, more than one in every five plate appearances ends in a strikeout. A strikeout is now 30% more likely than it was a little over a decade ago.

This is a problem with many possible solutions: raising the bottom of the strike zone; lowering the mound; or, my personal favorite, expanding the league. This piece isn’t prescriptive, however. The focus of this piece is to show exactly what the strikeout has replaced, and it isn’t actually all bad.

Because I started this piece by doing some research on the home-run record, we will focus here on the year 2000 as it compares to the present. That season represents what was probably the height of the PED era; it was also the season responsible for the league-wide high in home runs until this year. Because the power numbers between the two periods are similar, a comparison of the seasons creates an interesting vantage point from which to view the role of the strikeout.

Generally, we imagine that players have to sacrifice contact for power. It’s notable, then, that the power numbers of today are equivalent those of the 2000 season even though players are striking out 30% more often now than they did back then. To provide some background, here are some standard numbers from 2000 and 2017.

As the 20-point difference in wOBA illustrates, overall offensive levels were higher back in 2000. The ISO and BABIP figures are all roughly similar. When a batter hits a ball in play, that batted ball is just as likely to become a hit as it was before. When it lands fair, it’s leading to roughly the same amount of extra bases. All that’s basically the same.

In terms of differences, one finds that this year’s walk rate is a bit lower than in 2000. That has some influence on run scoring, but not at all to the same degree that the increase in strikeout rate has. In effect, 5% of potentially positive plate appearances have been turned into strikeouts. That’s significant. However, while the main complaint about strikeouts is that they lead to fewer balls in play, it isn’t accurate to suggest that every extra strikeout has actually had that effect.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
This independent league find has always been old for his levels, but he has legitimate stuff and deception.

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Pitchers can succeed without striking batters out, but a failure to whiff shifts more of the burden to the defense. Based on what we know about pitchers and their controllable skills, limiting the number of balls in play increases the likelihood of a good outing. Strikeouts might not guarantee an out due to the dropped third strike rule, but they result in outs virtually 99 percent of the time.

Successful pitching lines lacking strikeouts are strange to the eyes. They’re even stranger when high-strikeout hurlers post them. You’d think a pitcher like Colby Lewis could easily record one punchout in seven innings of work, but in a May 10 start, he held the Athletics to one run over 7 1/3 innings. And he didn’t record a strikeout.

In honor of Lewis’ odd line — 7 1/3 IP, 5 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 0 K — I decided to research two items: the best non-strikeout games in the Retrosheet era, and the highest percentage of non-strikeout starts in a season.

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It’s too early to worry. It’s only one outing, right? Right?

But when three of baseball’s premier strikeout pitchers combine for just one punchout in games on Friday, well, it’s interesting. And exceptionally rare–especially for these guys.

Entering 2011, Jon Lester had made 123 starts in his career, with his only K-less appearance coming on April 9, 2008. In that game he lasted 5 1/3 frames, allowing four hits and four runs to go along with four walks. Brett Myers had made 216 career starts and never left a game sans strikeout while lasting at least five frames. Ubaldo Jimenez had started 116 games, whiffing one or fewer batters in at least five innings on just two occasions: September 20, 2007 (6 1/3 IP, 5 H, 3 R, 3 BB, 1 K), and May 21, 2008 (7 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 1 K).

On Friday, neither Lester nor Myers recorded a strikeout, and Jimenez fanned only one batter. In fact, Myers recorded only one missed swing. In a total of 18 1/3 innings, this trio managed fewer strikeouts than Ryan Madson did in his one inning of work.

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With one out in the top of the third, and a 2-2 count, Felipe Lopez made a futile effort to hit a filthy, down and in John Smoltz slider. With the whiff, Smoltz earned a lifetime membership to the 3,000 Strikeout Club, a group that previously consisted of just fifteen pitchers. Making this feat even more remarkable are the facts that Smoltz missed a little over a year due to Tommy John surgery and, upon returning, found himself closing games for 3+ seasons. He became the fifth pitcher this decade to join the club, joining Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Curt Schilling, and Pedro Martinez.

Smoltz gave a phone interview to Baseball Tonight following the game in which he admitted to downplaying the milestone as much as he could until the reaction of the Atlanta crowd proved too much to simply brush aside. Later on the show, Kruk and Showalter answered e-mail responses to the posed question: What active pitcher has the best shot at 3,000 strikeouts? Kruk went with CC Sabathia and Showalter went with Johan Santana. Some of the e-mails suggested the likes of Carlos Zambrano, Felix Hernandez and Cole Hamels. This got me thinking: Which current pitchers really do have solid shots at joining Smoltz and the others in this illustrious group?

In order to help answer that question I called upon Bill James’s Career Assessments formula; this used to be known as his “Favorite Toy.” ESPN set up a page on which you can type in numbers corresponding to the appropriate fields and generate the current total a given player will amass based on the projected length of his career, as well as the probability said player reaches a specific target. For instance, I used Sabathia, who is currently 27 years old with 1142 career strikeouts entering this season. Plugging those numbers in as well as his strikeout totals for the last three seasons, the system projects Sabathia to pitch 7.5 more seasons averaging 188.5 strikeouts per year. This would give him 2,557 strikeouts for his career with a 26.2% chance at reaching 3,000.

I repeated this for every pitcher that currently has at least 900 strikeouts and was born during or after 1975. Pitchers like Mike Mussina and Jamie Moyer have upwards of 2,600 strikeouts but they are not likely to pitch much more after this season and do not quite rack up the K’s anyway. It is also difficult to plug King Felix and Hamels in because parts of their prior years are not likely indicative of what is to come. Of the 22 pitchers assessed only eight actually had a chance at 3,000; everyone else came out as having a 0.0% chance. Here are the eight, with their projected career total and chance at 3,000:

• Johan Santana: 2961, 47.6%
• Javier Vazquez: 2941, 44.9%
• Jake Peavy: 2827, 40.8%
• CC Sabathia: 2557, 26.2%
• Carlos Zambrano: 2510, 24.6%
• Josh Beckett: 2216, 11.3%
• Roy Oswalt: 2170, 4.0%
• Chris Carpenter: 2106, 1.3%

Of course things can change, and this system is not completely perfect, but it does shed light on just how hard it is to strike 3,000+ batters out. For fun, I plugged Felix Hernandez in and he came out with a projected total of 2,066 K with a 13.4% chance. After adjusting his 2005 season to be closer to what he may have gotten in 30+ starts, though, he comes out with 2286 and a 21.1% chance. Another interesting case is Aaron Harang, who has seemingly learned how to strike out guys as of late; Harang currently projects to 2210 with a 13.1% chance.

If you had to pick just one pitcher, in the above list or not, who would it be?