The Eighteenth Brumaire of Spencer Strider

Spencer Strider currently leads all qualified starters in strikeout rate. When I learned that bit of information, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, that tiny little guy’s on track to throw enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, good for him!”

But Strider is way out in front of the field. His K% is 38.9%; Kevin Gausman is second at 32.6%, with a small group of pitchers clustered behind him in the low 30s. Strider isn’t particularly walk-averse — his BB% is 40th-lowest among 67 qualified starters — and yet his K-BB% of 31.4% would be the fifth-best strikeout rate in the league.

I don’t want to say this is happening without anyone batting an eye — here we are, after all, batting our eyes at Strider’s strikeout rate. But we’ve become so inured to this kind of performance, and so quickly, that it’s worth taking a step back to consider the gravity of what he’s doing.

Right now, Strider is on track to post the third-highest K% of any qualified starter in baseball history. Second, really, because the all-time record of 41.1% was set by Shane Bieber in 2020, which shouldn’t really count. In 2019, Gerrit Cole posted a K% of 39.9%, which is the highest in baseball history over a season of 154 games or more.

Removing Strider and the class of 2020 from the equation, seven qualified starters have struck out 35% or more of their opponents: Pedro Martinez in 1999, Randy Johnson in 2001, and five others between 2017 and 2021. What was once an impossible feat became reality when two of the best pitchers of all time had the best seasons of their career in a historically high-strikeout era. And now it’s within reach for most Cy Young contenders.

Strikeout rate is a better measure of pitcher quality than K/9 ratio in general, but I’m going to use the latter here for two reasons. First, K/9 has a broader cultural legibility — we know offhand what it means to strike out a batter an inning. Second, Strider interests me not just because he’s striking out a ton of batters, but because he’s recording such a large percentage of his outs by strikeout. There’s a subtle but important distinction between the two.

Strider’s K/9 ratio right now is 14.3, which is the highest of any qualified starter in history during a season of any length. Strider, as Cole did in 2019, is recording more than half of his outs by strikeout. Recording half of one’s outs by strikeout (13.5 K/9 or more) is also the threshold a pitcher needs to beat in order to strike out more than 300 batters in less than 200 innings.

The 300-strikeout mark is a sacred one in baseball history. Dating back to 1871, it’s only been reached 69 times by 42 pitchers. Only 19 pitchers have done it throwing from 60 feet, 6 inches away.

In order to get to 300 strikeouts, a pitcher needs two things: A high ratio of strikeouts to innings, and a high volume of innings pitched. (I wrote about this in 2015, when Clayton Kershaw became the first pitcher in more than a decade to strike out 300 batters in a season.) The pitchers of the 1880s — John Clarkson, Hugh Daily, Old Hoss Radbourn, and so on — struck out only four or five batters per nine innings but did so in seasons of 500 innings or more.

Since 1900, the average league-wide strikeout rate has climbed without interruption, while the average workload for a starting pitcher has been somewhat cyclical. Two dead ball era pitchers — Rube Waddell and Walter Johnson — were able to get to 300 strikeouts per season on a workload in the high 300-inning range, while striking out roughly eight batters per nine innings.

After the start of the live ball era, workloads decreased to levels we wouldn’t have blinked at as late as the 1990s. The one outlier to reach 300 strikeouts between 1912 and 1963 was Bob Feller, who struck out 348 batters in 1946. But while we think of Feller as a strikeout specialist, he was able to achieve this feat despite not actually leading the AL in K/9 ratio; Hal Newhouser beat Feller by a fraction of a strikeout per inning that year. Instead, Feller led the AL in innings pitched by a huge margin (nearly 80 innings), which allowed him to get to 300 strikeouts and beyond.

In the 1960s and 1970s, workloads for aces climbed back up near and ultimately over 300 innings a season, and as strikeouts per inning continued to rise, the 300-strikeout season became commonplace. In 1965, Sudden Sam McDowell became the first pitcher to record more than 300 strikeouts in less than 300 innings pitched. Both he and Sandy Koufax posted K/9 ratios in the 10s, as did Nolan Ryan a few years later, but the normal 300-strikeout season in this era came from pitchers who struck out roughly a batter per inning and threw 300 innings a year.

Ultimately, the innings workloads got too high (in 1971, Mickey Lolich struck out 308 batters in 371 innings) and the pendulum swung the other way. Meanwhile, the league-wide strikeout rate continued to climb. The last pitcher to strike out 300 batters in a season with a K/9 ratio under 10 was J.R. Richard in 1979.

In 1989, Ryan posted the first season of more than 300 strikeouts and less than 250 innings. A decade later, Martinez got to 313 strikeouts in just 213 1/3 innings, which stood as the shortest 300-strikeout season until Cole beat that mark by an inning in 2019.

Here, we have the number of qualified starters per season who met certain high-strikeout thresholds in AL or NL play, since 1901, according to a Stathead search:

And here is the number of starting pitchers who met certain innings thresholds since 1901. (Note: This graph omits the strike-shortened years of 1981, 1994, and 1995, as well as 2020, because they messed up the pretty lines.):

The 300-strikeout pitchers through history have come along when one or both of these trend lines has been high. Today, starting pitchers throw fewer innings than ever while also striking out more batters than ever before. Or at least, striking out more batters than at any point apart from the pre-pitch clock, pre-sticky stuff crackdown bacchanal of the late 2010s.

The thing that’s so jarring about Strider’s K/9 ratio is that it would’ve been an astonishing number for a one-inning closer in the recent past. In 1997, Johnson, Martinez, and Curt Schilling all struck out more than 11 batters per nine innings, the first time in major league history that three qualified starters had done so in the same year. The next time that happened was in 2016 (Robbie Ray, Max Scherzer, José Fernández), and it’s happened every year since, topping out at 11 pitchers in 2020, or nine in 2019 if we’re only counting full seasons.

The first season more than one reliever (minimum 40 appearances) posted a K/9 ratio of 11 or more was 1987. As recently as 2007, only nine relievers did it. In 2019, that mark was a record 50.

Where Strider’s at now, the 14 K/9 range, has obviously never been done by a starter over a full season. The first reliever to do it was Rob Dibble in 1992; the first time three relievers got there in the same season was 2012, which is not that long ago! Mike Trout and Bryce Harper were the two Rookies of the Year in 2012!

Since Strider is posting strikeout rates that would make an elite reliever blush, even in today’s game, there are three questions I can’t yet answer but am interested in revisiting a few seasons from now.

First: Is Strider an outlier, or the shape of things to come? We’ve seen both in the course of history, when evaluating 300-strikeout pitchers. Many of the pitchers on that list, even great ones like Scherzer and Steve Carlton, are the product of how the best pitchers were used at the time. Then you have Johnson, Ryan, Koufax, and Waddell, who were unusual either in quantity of innings or strikeouts or both, and could not be replicated in their time. In 20 years, will we look back on Strider as an outlier or an archetype?

Second: Are we headed toward a strikeout-per-inning sound barrier? Certainly, current orthodoxy demands that pitchers strike out as many batters as practicable. And the disincentive against strikeouts on the offensive end is not great enough to persuade hitters — on the aggregate — to avoid strikeouts at all costs. (Perhaps the success of Luis Arraez will provide a road map forward for young hitters, though all evidence points to Arraez himself being even more of an outlier than Strider.)

The recent minor downtick in league-wide strikeout rate is the result of changes to league policy. This is unusual in major league history, as the league bigwigs’ deistic attitude toward the on-field product stretches back more than 100 years:

Absent further intervention (here’s where I shout about how they should move the mound back until my neighbors call the cops on me), that strikeout rate will only climb back up. Strider is breaking new ground, as is Félix Bautista, who is currently a tenth of a strikeout per nine innings ahead of Chapman’s reliever K/9 record, set in 2014. At 17.8 K/9, Bautista is recording nearly two-thirds of his outs without the intervention of the seven guys behind him.

The fact that Chapman’s record is only being threatened now after nine years, as all sorts of other strikeouts records fell, is instructive. Because K/9 ratio does not contain the potential for limitless growth. There are only 27 Ks available in every 9; the fact that Strider can get to 14 or Bautista can get to almost 18 is outrageous enough. (It’s also funny that these are the two exemplars of the high-strikeout pitcher these days, because they could not look any more dissimilar from each other. Strider is striking out 14 batters per nine innings, and you could probably fit about 14 Striders inside one Bautista. But that’s not the point.)

So eventually, these guys are going to run face-first into an asymptote like a toddler into a sliding glass door, right? They’ll reach a point where the effort it takes to get from 17 K/9 to 18 is either not humanly possible or not worth it. At some point, their approaches will be so optimized to chase strikeouts that they’ll suffer in other ways — command, durability, whatever — and go try something else.

I wonder if some pitchers are tickling the edge of that frontier already. And if they are, is that something that’s achievable for Bautista alone now (or Bautista and Edwin Díaz), that will be within reach for 10 pitchers in 10 years and 50 pitchers in 20 years? Is 17 K/9 the new 11 K/9?

If so, that raises the third question: Does Austin Riley regret working on his defense? Think back to when Riley came up in 2019 — he was a big, strong kid who could hit the ball a mile but played third base like he was wearing a suit of armor. And obviously he’s not exactly Scott Rolen down there these days, but he’s better. By Outs Above Average, he’s downright middle-of-the-pack.

But when Strider is on the mound, none of that matters. Riley has played every inning at third base for Atlanta this season, and by extension has been up on his toes for every single one of the 1,893 pitches Strider has thrown this season. Of those, just 17 — less than one in 100 — have resulted in Riley making a play on a batted ball.

Riley also plays behind other Braves pitchers — Bryce Elder, Jared Shuster before his demotion, Collin McHugh — who do make occasional use of their infielders, so all that work he’s put into honing his defensive craft hasn’t been a total waste. But Strider is in the process of solving pitching. He’s dominating hitters in a fashion no other starting pitcher has ever matched in major league history. Baseball is dominated by random chance, and Strider is eliminating the cruel unpredictability of the batted ball from his game.

It’s a lonely way to play baseball.

I’ve told this story in other places, but when I was in grad school, I took a few political philosophy classes from a Marxist professor who was also a huge baseball fan. He considered youth baseball to be an unusually egalitarian sport, because the team that strikes out least on offense and commits the fewest errors on defense tends to win. (I don’t remember what if any empirical research he cited at the time, but this assertion surely passes the smell test for anyone who’s played, coached, or watched Little Leaguers kick the ball around in the dirt.)

The way to strike out less, and commit fewer errors, is not to cultivate the excellence of the most naturally gifted players, but to bring up the standard of play for the worst players. Everyone needs to be able to make contact. Everyone needs to be able to throw and catch cleanly. The political applications of this parable should be obvious.

Or to quote the 20th century political theorist Crash Davis: “Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. It’s more democratic.”

At the major league level, in the world Strider and his contemporaries inhabit, I’m sure nobody gives a damn about all that. I’m even more sure that nobody should give a damn whether a given style of play can be interpreted as advancing a communitarian outlook on society or an individualistic one. It’s about winning, and right now strikeouts are a particularly efficient means to an end.

Are strikeouts actually fascist? No. But they do result from the exaltation of the individual and the mistrust of the community. We want pitchers to miss bats because if they don’t, their teammates might let them down. Perhaps individual pitchers can transcend the need for fallible teammates by taking defense out of the equation.

But for 150 years, baseball has stifled the superman. Exceptions are celebrated as such, but the history of baseball is a history of highlighting the narrow limits of individual greatness. Consider the Angels’ persistent and utter failure to build a winner around Albert Pujols, Mike Trout, and now Shohei Ohtani. Ted Williams never won a World Series, nor did Barry Bonds. No individual, no matter how great, can drag his team to success.

There’s a rich tradition in sportswriting of isolating these failures in order to accuse Williams, or Bonds, or Kershaw, or Alex Rodriguez, of lacking a sort of Nietzchean will to power that’s a necessary component of team success. That this tradition is rich does not stop it from being frivolous and ahistorical — deliberately so, I suspect.

If any player ever possessed the ability to impose his own force of individual greatness onto a championship setting, it was Bob Gibson, who was named MVP of his first two World Series and averaged nine innings pitched in nine postseason starts, in which he allowed an ERA of just 1.89. In 1968, Gibson started the World Series by breaking the single-game postseason strikeout record. He did not need his teammates that day. In Game 7, he lost when Curt Flood — one of the best defensive center fielders of his time — misplayed a fly ball into a triple that broke a scoreless tie.

Even the greatest individual cannot win a championship on his own. Conversely, even a pedestrian player can be exalted by great teammates. Consider Clay Bellinger, who played 183 games in the major leagues and hit .193 in his career. But with the Yankees from 1999 to 2001, he won three pennants and two World Series, just the same as Gibson.

It’s ironic that America’s pastime lies in such contradiction to American individualism, which teaches us that anyone can overcome their circumstances, and that success or failure is the result of individual ability and rectitude. The inability to square that contradiction is the genesis of the avalanche of hoary rings-obsessed analysis that troubled our grandparents’ sports pages. I have no doubt that it will inform whatever our grandchildren read about baseball, should the sport continue to exist that far into the future.

But there is no individual too self-sufficient for baseball to humble, no hero too great to be punished for his hubris. Strider is putting that proposition to the test, as baseball becomes more strikeout-heavy, and therefore more individualistic, than it ever has been. But eventually he and his fellow travelers will hit their limit. Maybe because of physical or technical obstacles, but mostly because throughout its history, baseball has rebuked those who go alone, and rewarded those who go together.