How’s this for a Hot Streak:  In a stretch of 19 games in 1947, Walker Cooper hit 14 homers and drove in 38 runs.    Anybody top that?    You got 39 RBI in 19 games anywhere?   40 RBI in 20 games?   

            I got interested in Walker Cooper after noticing something surprising about his career.   This is Cooper’s career record:

            His 1947 season with the New York Giants sticks out there like a sore thumb—or, if not a sore thumb, at least an oversized digit of some kind; 35 homers there, half as many anywhere else, 122 RBI there, no similar numbers anywhere else.

            A friend of mine is named "Walker" after Walker Cooper.   While Cooper was a very famous player with the Cardinals in the early 1940s, he was famous mostly as Mort’s brother.   He was also Don Blasingame’s father-in-law, but he’s not famous for that.  He didn’t play regularly until he was 27 years old, which is unusual; he lost a year to the war (1945), and he was a part-time player almost all of his career.    In spite of this he lasted until he was old enough for his daughter to be dating his teammates, and was a highly effective pinch hitter at an advanced age.

            The 35-homer, 122-RBI season is the pearl of his career, and there is a back story there that was familiar to fans of my generation, although it would mean little to people under 50.   The 1947 Giants hit 221 homers as a team.   The 221 homers were:

            a)  a major league record at the time, and

            b)  almost twice as many as 14 of the other 15 teams.   The Pirates were the only other major league team to hit more than 115.  

            The previous major league record for homers by a team was 182, by the 1936 Yankees.  The Giants obliterated that record—but finished fourth.    It was a famous event at the time, frequently sited as evidence that home runs are overrated.    Cooper was one of four players who hit most of those homers—Johnny Mize, 51 homers, 138 RBI, Willard Marshall, 36 homers, 107 RBI, Cooper, and Bobby Thompson, 29 homers, 85 RBI.    Marshall’s year was more of a fluke than Cooper’s; other than that season he never hit more than 17 homers.   Thompson, although he later had good years, had only 2 homers before that season—he was basically a rookie—and even Mize, although he is in the Hall of Fame, had only one season prior to 1947 with more than 28 homers.

            Of course, later teams have pushed home run totals way beyond 221.  So anyway, you tend to write that season off as a fluke, and, in particular, you tend to write it off as a park illusion.    I was, then, quite surprised when I took a look at Cooper’s career home/road batting record:

            His career OPS was 64 points higher on the road than in his home parks—one of the larger home field liabilities I have ever seen.   Wow, I thought; that must mean that his career numbers were held down by other parks, and 1947 was the one year that he had the park working for him.  

            Wrong again:

            His OPS in 1947, the fluke year, was 247 points higher on the road than it was in his home park.   Three-fourths of his doubles and almost two-thirds of his home runs and RBI were on the road. 

            Which, by the way, was not true for the other guys on the team; Willard Marshall hit 25 of his 36 homers in the Polo Grounds, and Mize hit 29 of 51 there.    So then I started looking at Cooper’s daily log.   I knew he hit homers in six straight games that year—I mentioned that in the Historical Abstract—but I really had no idea of the magnitude of his hot streak.   This is Cooper’s Game Log from June 9 to July 3, 1947:

            Cooper hit "just" .370 in the 19-game stretch, but with 14 homers and 38 RBI.   Interesting year.

K Minus Walks

            Some of you may be aware that I’ve had a disagreement with a reader on the site about the use of Strikeouts Minus Walks as an indicator of the quality of the Strikeout and Walk combination, and I won’t mention the reader’s name because it is better not to personalize disagreements, but. . .it’s a highly esteemed reader that I don’t ordinarily argue with.

            The reader, however, argues that the best way to look at strikeouts and walks by a pitcher is to look at strikeouts minus walks, to look at the margin between the two.   That can’t be right, I argue, because to do that implies that one strikeout is roughly equal in value to one walk, which it isn’t; a strikeout is nowhere near equal in value to a walk. 

            OK, how do we study this?   Here’s what I did.   I took all pitcher/seasons from 1946 through 2009 (I haven’t updated that data base yet to include 2010).   For all pitchers in that area I figured their Strikeouts Minus Walks per 9 innings.   Then I focused on narrow bands of Strikeouts Minus Walks:

            All pitchers with 0.88 to 1.12 Strikeouts Minus Walks Per 9 Innings (Representing 1.00)

            All pitchers with 1.88 to 2.12 Strikeouts Minus Walks Per 9 innings (Representing 2.00)

            All pitchers with 2.88 to 3.12 Strikeouts Minus Walks Per 9 innings (Representing 3.00)

            All pitchers with 3.85 to 4.15 Strikeouts Minus Walks Per 9 innings (Representing 4.00)

            All pitchers with 4.80 to 5.20 Strikeouts Minus Walks Per 9 innings (Representing 5.00)

            All pitchers with 5.75 to 6.25 Strikeouts Minus Walks Per 9 innings (Representing 6.00)

            There were 917 pitchers in Group 1.00,

1,154 in Group 2.00,  

1,008 in Group 3.00,

790 in Group 4.00,

613 in Group 5.00, and

391 in Group 6.00.

It is certainly true that the pitchers in Group 2.00—the pitchers who have 2.00 more strikeouts than walks per nine innings—are better than those in Group 1.00, Group 3.00 is better than Group 2.00, etc.   This is the data on that:

Let me strip out some of the data there to emphasis the rest:

As the margin between strikeouts and walks increases, the performance improves—the Winning Percentage improves, the ERA improves, and the number of Cy Young seasons increases.   This is not a surprise. 

That’s one question, but there is another.   Is 7 strikeouts, 3 walks really the same as 5 strikeouts and 1 walk?    Are these really legitimate groups?

The group "6.00" includes Nolan Ryan, 1973 (383 strikeouts, 162 walks) and Sam McDowell, 1968 (283 strikeouts, 110 walks), but also includes Greg Maddux, 1997 (177 strikeouts, 20 walks) and Roy Halladay, 2003 (204 strikeouts, 32 walks.)   The group "5.00" includes Herb Score, 1956 (263-129), Kerry Wood, 2002 (217-97), and Sam McDowell, 1970 (304-131), but also includes Ferguson Jenkins, 1974 (225-45), Rick Reed, 2001 (142-31), and Jimmy Key, 1993 (173-43).  Should these pitchers really be grouped together?

Each of these groups can be easily re-sorted into high-strikeout, high-walk and low-strikeout, low-walk sub groups, by sorting them by ((SO + BB)/IP) rather than ((SO – BB)/IP).   If these are valid groups—if one strikeout has roughly equal impact to one walk—then the top half of the 6.00 group should be equal in effectiveness to the bottom half of the 6.00 group.   I argue that this cannot be true, because one strikeout is NOT equal in impact to one walk; my friend argues that it is.

Not so much.     This is the "6.00" group, sorted into the top half (Ryan and McDowell) and the bottom half (Maddux and Halladay):

The winning percentage of the Maddux/Halladay pitchers is .601.   The winning percentage of the Ryan/McDowell pitchers is .546.    This is the split for group 1.00:

Again, there is a 50-point difference in the winning percentage between the top half of the group—the high strikeout/high walk group--and the bottom half.   The difference between Group 1.00 and Group 2.00, in Winning Percentage, is only 15 points.   The difference between Group 1.00 and Group 3.00 is only 35 points winning percentage.   The difference between the high strikeout/high walk pitchers and the low strikeout/low walk pitchers in these two groups is 50 points.  

This chart splits all six groups into their high walk/high strikeout and low walk/low strikeout components:

OK, the winning percentage difference is more like 40 points than 50, but still. …it takes almost two strikeouts to offset one walk, not one to one.  

Another reader, trying to be helpful, suggests that the accuracy of "Strikeouts Minus Walks" supports the McCracken thesis, but actually, that’s the problem:  It clearly contradicts the McCracken thesis.   One strikeout only eliminates about .30 hits.  Three-tenths of a hit is obviously worth nowhere near as much as one walk—therefore, for strikeouts minus walks to be a valid way to look at the relationship, the strikeout pitcher would have to be gaining a large additional benefit from his strikeout tendency, beyond the direct benefit of having one less ball in play.   The McCracken thesis is that there is no such secondary benefit. 

            My experience is that posting research like this rarely ends a debate.   Other people will still see the data in other ways, and obviously they have a right to do so.   I don’t see that Strikeouts Minus Walks is an appropriate way to look at the Strikeout and Walk data.