The Dominant Club

Baseball pitchers are supposed to get outs while avoiding runs, and the way to avoid runs is to avoid baserunners. The standard way to generate a baserunner is through a walk or a hit. The most dominant way to avoid a baserunner is via the strikeout. To be good, then, pitchers would like to strike lots of batters out while allowing very few hits or walks. But here's an interesting thing: almost no one in Major League Baseball history has managed to strike out more batters over their careers than they have allowed to reach base on a hit or a walk. As best I can tell, in all of MLB history only two starting pitchers have done this over the course of a whole career. Randy Johnson gave up 3346 hits and issued 1497 walks, a total of 4843, and he struck out 4875 batters, for a difference of +32. Pedro Martinez, the best starting pitcher ever in my opinion, allowed 2221 hits and 760 walks for a total of 2981 such baserunners, and he struck out 3154 men, for a difference of +173. No one else has ever maintained this feat over a whole career as a starting pitcher.



In fact, throughout MLB history there have been only 89 pitchers with a positive SO - H - BB differential, all but two of whom are either active or relievers, or both. The highest ever differential belongs to Billy Wagner: 1196 strikeouts versus just 601 hits and 300 walks, for +295. Almost certain to eclipse Wagner's mark if he doesn't get injured, however, is Craig Kimbrel, the Braves' fireballer who is said to have learned a great deal from Wagner in the latter's brief stint with the Braves at the end of his career. Kimbrel has given up 107 hits and 77 walks, but has struck out a staggering 345 batters; that's a differential of +161, so he's struck out nearly twice as many batters as he's had walks and hits. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, there are a bunch of active young starters on this list, with Stephen Strasburg (447 K, 307 H, 108 BB, +32), Yu Darvish (393 K, 245 H, 136 BB, +12)*, and Matt Harvey (234 K, 141 H, 55 BB)* being the most notable. If we expand the criterion to include pitchers who had more strikeouts than hits or unintentional walks, the list expands to a full 113 pitchers, including another dominant young starter, Chris Sale (452 K, 342 H, 119 BB, -9, 10 IBB), although I suppose Sale spent the first couple of years of his career as a starter. Of course, he's doing it again this year, with 149 strikeouts against 108 hits and 31 walks. Interestingly, Trevor Hoffman achieved this feat while Mariano Rivera did not; while Hoffman walked an extra half-batter per nine innings, he also struck out over a full extra batter per nine than Rivera, who isn't really a strikeout pitcher.

The quirkiest name on this list, perhaps, is Masanori Murakami, who pitched in 54 games including one start for the San Francisco Giants and had an even 100 strikeouts against just 65 hits and 23 walks in 89.1 innings pitched. In 1964-65. He did this a very long time before just about anyone else on the list. Apparently he was on loan from a Japanese team and had to return to them after his 1965 season. He was the first Japanese player to play in MLB, and was apparently a sidearming left-handed screwball specialist who had a long and successful career back in Japan after leaving the Giants. Huh.

Overall what's striking about this list is how many of the players are playing now, and at the very beginnings of their career. Of, for instance, the 60 such players with at least 15 career strikeout, just 17 have not either played a game in 2013 or spent time on the disabled list in this year, and one other, Octavio Dotel, may have had his career end early in the season, so that's about 42 properly active players, or 70%. Most of that 30% are pretty recent, too. In fact, a good indicator of how young all these guys are is the fact that just 45 of the 113 who make the expanded IBB-excluded list have at least 100 career strikeouts, with Mr. Murakami the 45th. And these are all, mind you, very very high-strikeout guys, so you can expect that none of the people below 100 career K's have pitched as many as 100 innings. Probably the majority of those 113 guys are active relief pitchers near the beginning of their careers, and it will be very interesting to see how many of them keep it up. As the Mets broadcasters have frequently noted, the last eleven months of MLB baseball have been the eleven highest months all-time by most strikeouts and by strikeout percentage, and during that time walks are down and home runs are down, so maybe the Dominant Club will get a bit less exclusive going forward. Can Harvey or Strasburg or Darvish keep it up? Will Craig Kimbrel keep his 87.5% excess rate going, or anything like it? Have we entered a new era of absolutely, mind-bogglingly dominant pitching, especially relief pitching? Or are we just in a brief little phase where it's easier than it has ever been before to strike out more than you allow walks and hits?

Only time will tell.



*For Darvish and Harvey these numbers don't include their performances today (well, yesterday I suppose). It doesn't much affect things, though, because neither of them walked a batter, Harvey notched eight strikeouts against just five hits (while losing to the Marlins, ugh) and Darvish, well... He also allowed five hits. And he struck out 14 men in seven innings of work. His FIP (Fielding-Independent Pitching) for the day was -0.96. Yeah, that's right. He didn't allow a single run and that constituted getting massively let down by his defense. Honestly, I think that's right. I mean, using Darvish's .252 batting average on balls in play entering the day he would've had about a 3% chance of having all twelve of the balls in play he allowed caught for outs. Instead, five of them fell in for base hits, and he completed just seven innings. But had they all been caught, he would've been just one out short of a perfect game through those same 26 batters with those same 14 strikeouts. Oh, wait. Never mind.