Good control, low strikeouts: A baseball rarity |

A fellow baseball blogger, Sky Kalkman wrote something interesting this morning. In a post exploring the relationship between control and command for pitchers, Sky opined:

My non-expert hunch is that one of the main reasons pitchers don’t throw more pitches in the strike zone is that their stuff isn’t good enough. They aim for the edge of the zone because the cost of missing outside (a ball) isn’t as bad as the cost of missing over the heart of the plate (a line drive or home run.) A pitcher with impeccable aim but mediocre stuff won’t rate highly in control.

My first impulse was to disagree with Sky, considering Greg Maddux threw in the 80s for much of his career and was an expert at slowly widening the strike zone. With a look at the numbers, though, Sky may have a point.

It’s relatively unheard of in baseball history for starting pitchers with at least 162 innings in a season to strike out fewer than 150 batters and post SO/BB ratios of 5.00 or better. Brad Radke and David Wells did it three times apiece. Bret Saberhagen did it in 1994 when he posted an 11.00 SO/BB ratio, the best ever for a starting pitcher. Otherwise, the feat I speak of has been done just four other times since 1901, including just once prior to 1985.

A full list is as follows, in chronological order:

Rk	Player	SO	SO/BB	IP	Year ▾	Age	Tm	G	GS	CG	SHO	W	L	H	R	ER	BB	ERA	ERA+	HR
1	Brad Radke	117	5.09	200.2	2005	32	MIN	31	31	3	1	9	12	214	98	90	23	4.04	110	33
2	David Wells	107	5.10	184.0	2005	42	BOS	30	30	2	0	15	7	220	95	91	21	4.45	102	21
3	Carlos Silva	71	7.89	188.1	2005	26	MIN	27	27	2	0	9	8	212	83	72	9	3.44	130	25
4	Brad Radke	143	5.50	219.2	2004	31	MIN	34	34	1	1	11	8	229	92	85	26	3.48	136	23
5	Jon Lieber	102	5.67	176.2	2004	34	NYY	27	27	0	0	14	8	216	95	85	18	4.33	104	20
6	David Wells	101	5.05	195.2	2004	41	SDP	31	31	0	0	12	8	203	85	81	20	3.73	104	23
7	David Wells	101	5.05	213.0	2003	40	NYY	31	30	4	1	15	7	242	101	98	20	4.14	106	24
8	Brad Radke	137	5.27	226.0	2001	28	MIN	33	33	6	2	15	11	235	105	99	26	3.94	115	24
9	Bret Saberhagen	143	11.00	177.1	1994	30	NYM	24	24	4	0	14	4	169	58	54	13	2.74	153	13
10	Dennis Eckersley	117	6.16	169.1	1985	30	CHC	25	25	6	2	11	7	145	61	58	19	3.08	129	15
11	Cy Young	140	5.60	287.2	1906	39	BOS	39	34	28	0	13	21	288	137	102	25	3.19	86	3

These men are the minority. Of the 57 other times since 1901 that a pitcher has had a SO/BB ratio of 5.0 or better all have recorded at least 150 strikeouts. I suppose this makes sense in that a pitcher can walk a lot of batters and maintain a respectable SO/BB ratio if he has more strikeouts and that low walk totals are uncommon for pitchers, strikeouts or no. A pitcher with 150 strikeouts could walk no more than 30 batters to have a 5.0 SO/BB ratio. In 2011, just two pitchers with at least 162 innings had fewer than 30 walks.

It goes without saying that many pitchers have thrown at least 162 innings in a season with SO/BB ratios of 5.0 or lower. In 2011 alone, 44 pitchers did this, with hurlers like Jake Westbrook, John Lannan, and Brad Penny having scarcely more strikeouts than walks. Maybe Sky has a point. Maybe guys like Westbrook, Lannan, and Penny knew their stuff wasn’t that great and that they’d be best-suited sticking to the fringes of the strike zone. It makes me wonder what Radke, Wells, and Saberhagen were doing differently.

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Vinnie

12 years ago

Could it be that they just don’t have the pin point control that some of these other pitchers have? Or could they have much better stuff that actually fools the umpire into calling strikes balls?

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Graham

Reply to Vinnie

That’s a good question. I don’t know.

DavidJ

Carlos Silva’s 2005 was the first thing I thought of when I saw the title of this post, and sure enough, there it is.

Reply to DavidJ

Nine walks in 188.1 innings is just nuts, especially when he had 35 walks the season before and 32 the season after.

Hartvig

I does seem that a 5 to 1 ratio of strikeouts to walks is an extraordinarily high number. I didn’t check carefully but I know that most of the seasons listed above actually led the league and it looks like that in some years a ratio of a little over 2:1 will put you among the top 10 in the league and 2.5:1 will almost always do it. Lew Burdette could be a poster child for the few strikeouts and fewer walks group and he only exceeded the 2.5:1 threshold twice with a high of 2.76:1 and yet he managed… Read more »

Reply to Hartvig

There may be other ways to look at this, quantifiable or no. What do you think they are?

Reply to Graham

Ha! Buggered if I know, at least this late at night. Let me get a little sleep and I’ll see if I can come up with something. I know if you’re not striking anyone out you’re going to have a lot of balls put into play so it’s got to be more than just not walking anyone as well.

Mike L

Silva and Saberhagen look like the outliers-Saberhagen because he is just better than everyone else, including a lower HR rate, and Silva because this season was clearly his best. Saberhagen had already won two Cy Youngs at this point, so maybe reputation helped. But Silva’s success is aberrant. It’s as if he got his mechanics to work just once.