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
Vinnie
11 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?

DavidJ
DavidJ
11 years ago

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.

Hartvig
Hartvig
11 years ago

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 »

Hartvig
Hartvig
11 years ago
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
Mike L
11 years ago
Reply to  Hartvig

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.