Welcome to the Club, Smoltz: Who’s Next?

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?