Strikeout Tigers

            Strikeout totals go up all the time, so the team record for strikeouts is always or very often some number from the last few seasons.  Entering our current century the record for strikeouts by a team’s pitchers was held by the 1997 Atlanta Braves, with three Hall of Famers in their starting rotation.   I could name them, but then, so could you.  The fourth starter was Denny Neagle, who was 20-5 with a 2.97 ERA and 172 strikeouts in 223 innings. 

            That record for strikeouts by a team was broken by the 2001 Red Sox, whose starting pitchers were Pedro Martinez, Hideo Nomo, Tim Wakefield, David Cone and Frank Castillo.  Nomo led the league in strikeouts, with 220, since Pedro was hurt and missed half the season.  The Sox struck out 1,259 batters, a total which was an all-time record then, but is no longer one of the 150 highest totals of all time.  Their record was broken by the 2003 Chicago Cubs, a first-place team with a starting rotation of Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, Carlos Zambrano, Matt Clement and Shawn Estes.  Wood struck out 266 batters, which led the league, while Prior had 245, which was second.

            Their strikeout record lasted ten years, remarkably enough, but was broken by the 2013 Detroit Tigers, with a starting group of Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Anibal Sanchez, Rick Porcello and Mister Fister.  Their record was broken by the Cleveland Indians in 2014, and also by the Tampa Bay Rays, although I guess the Rays wouldn’t count; they were the Sammy Sosas of the team strikeout record, the also-rans who also broke the old record.  The Indians’ 2014 record was broken by the Dodgers in 2016, and also the Nationals.  The Dodgers 2016 record was broken by five different teams in 2017, led by Cleveland, and then Cleveland’s record was broken in 2018 by the Astros and also the Yankees.  In 2019 there was no new record, and there will be no new record in 2020, because of the Coronavirus, although as of now the 19 highest totals of all time were all from the years 2017 to 2019.  So the 2018 Astros’ team record for strikeouts is now an ancient and venerated record. 

             When Leon Spinks defeated Muhammad Ali for the Heavyweight Boxing Championship in 1978, he said of Ali that "He’s still the greatest.  I’m just the latest."  So it is with the strikeout record; whoever holds it is just the latest, but the greatest ever was

            ???

            Any ideas?

            How about the 1946 Detroit Tigers?   I’m not saying that this is absolutely the correct answer, but I’ve got a methodology, and that is the answer it comes up with.  The Tigers, who finished second with a record of 92-62, were led by Hal Newhouser, then finishing up a 3-year run as the best pitcher in baseball.  The American League’s MVP in 1944 and 1945, in 1946 he went 26-9 with a 1.94 ERA, 275 strikeouts.   The Tigers’ four-man rotation was Newhouser, Dizzy Trout, Virgil Trucks and Fred Hutchinson.   Trout had been second in the MVP voting in 1944, losing to Newhouser by a vote of 236-232; actually Trout had more first-place votes than Newhouser did, 10 to 7.   Trucks, known has "Fire" Trucks, had struck out 418 batters as a 19-year-old in the minor leagues, while Hutchinson, remembered as a Hospital in Seattle, is perhaps the greatest control pitcher of all time.   Newhouser, Trucks, Trout and Hutchinson were 2^nd, 4^th, 5^th and 6^th in the league in strikeouts.

            The Tiger pitchers struck out 896 batters, some sources say 898; in any case it was a major league record at the time.  (This was the same team, incidentally, for which Roy Cullenbine had a .477 on base percentage.  He was used as a fourth outfielder, and batted 6^th when he was in the lineup.)   Anyway, the argument for the Tigers’ being the greatest strikeout team of all time is this.   The 1946 Tigers had 5,877 batters facing pitcher, and struck out 896 of them.   That is 15%--actually, .15246.   The norm for all pitchers in the years 1940 to 1949 was .09216.  The standard deviation of team strikeouts in those same years was .01445.   The 1946 Tigers thus were 4.1 Standard Deviations above the norm for the Decade.  This is the highest figure of all time—hence, the 1946 Tigers were the greatest strikeout battalion ever assembled. 

            There are problems with this method, as there are problems with every method.  The 1946 American League was a high-strikeout league compared to the decade; thus, the Tigers would be less impressive if compared to their own league than if compared to the decade.  But there are problems with comparing the team only to their own league, too.  Eight teams is a small group of teams.  Standard Deviations are not designed to describe small populations, like "eight", and don’t work well in them.  Leagues, particularly then but still now, are small enough groups that individuals who may be historic outliers can be artificially normalized by comparing them to norms that they contributed heavily toward creating.  Two pitchers—Newhouser and Bob Feller—accounted for 12% of the league strikeouts in 1946.  Feller in that season set what was at the time regarded as an American League strikeout record, with 348 (subsequent research has shown that Rube Waddell may have struck out 349 in 1904.  The record listed at the time was 343.)  Newhouser struck out more batters as a percentage of batters faced and more per inning than Feller did.  Newhouser, Trucks and Hutchinson were 1^st, 3^rd and 4^th in the league in strikeouts per inning, with Feller second.

            My point is that the standard deviation relative to the LEAGUE is problematic, because the league is a relatively small group of teams, and the Tigers’ four strikeout kings have a large impact on that group.   The standard deviation relative to the DECADE is also problematic, for different reasons, but in my view it is less problematic.  Using the decade as the standard, the 1946 Tigers are the most outstanding strikeout team of all time. 

            The 1946 Tigers are the only team which was Four Standard Deviations above the norm; we will represent 4.1 standard deviations above the norm as 141, and you can probably figure that out.  There are eight teams in history which were at least three standard deviations above the decade norm for strikeouts.  Those are:

1.      1946 Detroit—Newhouser, Trout, Trucks and Hutchinson

2.     1959 Dodgers—Koufax and Drysdale; oddball World Championship although the team was not great; 3.6 standard deviations above the norm (136).

3.     1924 Dodgers—Dazzy Vance, the MVP with a 28-6 won-lost record, had 262 strikeouts.  The only other pitcher in the league who had even one-third that many was his teammate, Burleigh Grimes, who had 135.   3.4 standard deviations above the norm (134).

4.     2018 Astros—(133).  Verlander, Gerrit Cole and Charlie Morton.  Red Sox cleaned their clock in the League Playoffs.

5.     1971 Mets—(133).  Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and a young kid named Nolan Ryan, who was traded to California after the season.

6.     1905 Philadelphia A’s—(132).  Rube Waddell and Eddie Plank were 1-2 in the majors in strikeouts.   Also lost in the World Series.

7.     2003 Cubs—(131).  Wood and Prior.

8.     2019 Astros—(131). 

Ninth and 10^th on that list, if anybody cares, would be the 1904 Philadelphia A’s (129) and the 2017 Cleveland Indians (129). 

This research is actually part of a larger project.   The goal of the project is to estimate the runs saved by fielders and pitchers, runs saved against zero as opposed to runs saved against the league average.   It’s a long story, and we’ll get into that later, possibly, God willing and the creeks don’t rise and the Coronavirus doesn’t kill us all.  Anyway, what I really need to know, for that project, is not what the BEST teams are, but what the WORST teams are.  I need to know where the floor is, where the bottom is. 

The WORST strikeout team of all time, relative to their era, is the 2003 Detroit Tigers.  That was the team that went 43-119; you probably remember them.  Their three top starters were Mike Maroth (6-21, 5.73 ERA), Jeremy Bonderman (6-19, 5.56 ERA), and Nate Cornejo (6-17, 4.76).  Bonderman led the team in strikeouts with 108.   Bonderman was a 20-year-old rookie who was pulled out of the rotation late in the season so that he wouldn’t lose 20 games.  The team struck out 764 batters, which would have been a good total in the 1950s, but which was 2.8 Standard Deviations below the norm in their own decade (72).  

The most interesting team on the low-strikeout side, by far, is Bambi’s Brewers.   The 1977 Milwaukee Brewers were 67-95, a mere 33 games out of first place.  They hired as their manager that winter George Bamberger, a highly respected pitching coach.   Under Bamberger’s guidance the team ERA dropped by 57 points in 1978, and the team went 93-69.   They followed that up with several more excellent seasons, finally making the World Series in 1982, although that was two managers later. 

Anyway, what I never realized until now—what I don’t think anyone had realized—was the quite remarkable extent to which Bamberger turned around the pitching staff by eschewing strikeouts, and focusing on getting rid of walks.   This will show up on the chart below; these are the "worst" strikeout teams of all time:

2003 Tigers              72  (2.8 Standard Deviations below the decade norm)

1992 Tigers              74

1950 St. Louis Browns                  75

1918 Philadelphia A’s                    75

1980 Milwaukee Brewers               76

1979 Milwaukee Brewers               76

1978 Milwaukee Brewers               76

2002 Detroit Tigers                       77

1961 Washington Senators             77 (A first-year expansion team)

1991 Detroit Tigers                        77

Those are all American League teams, in part because of the DH Rule; I didn’t normalize the DH Rule out of existence, again believing that that does more harm than good.  The worst National League teams ever were the 1961 Milwaukee Braves (78) and the 1981 Cardinals (78). 

Anyway, back to the Brewers.  Most of these were terrible teams or at least not very good teams, but the Brewers are on the list not because they were bad, but as an option.  They CHOSE not to use strikeout pitchers.  Their leading non-strikeout pitcher was Lary Sorensen.  In 1978 Sorensen was 18-12 with a 3.21 ERA, but struck out only 78 batters in 281 innings.  I knew that Sorensen could not have a long, successful career with that extraordinarily low strikeout ratio.  NOW this would be common knowledge, but at that time I was the only person who knew that, the only person who had studied it.  My argument that Sorensen would not be able to sustain his success was not a popular argument, and especially was not a popular argument with his agents, the Hendricks Brothers, who I worked with and worked for.  They didn’t want to hear it, and they didn’t believe it. 

The Brewers choosing to eschew strikeouts in order to avoid walks. . .would that work, in 2020?  I doubt that it would.  It might; I don’t know.  I doubt it.  At that time walks were probably more important than strikeouts in the success of a pitcher.  Now, because strikeouts are so much more common, that is clearly not true.  

The best strikeout teams ever are 3+ standard deviations above the norm, but no team is 3 standard deviations BELOW the norm.  Talent in major league baseball is not normally distributed; it is the right-end tail of the bell-shaped curve.  The effects of this on the team strikeout distribution curve are slight, but certainly detectable. 

Well. . . .I’d better put on a record a little stuff about the decade norms before I sign off here.   In the years 1900 to 1909, the norm for strikeouts per 1000 batters faced was 96.  This is how it has changed over the decades:

So there have been two decades in which strikeouts have gone down, and nine in which they have gone up.    This chart includes the Standard Deviations by decade:

The standard deviation is high for the last decade because the strikeout totals went up so much during the decade that the norms for the end of the decade are different than the norms for the start of the decade.   Thanks for reading.