As I roll up to the Christmas holidays, I like to reminisce and think about something baseball-related besides “will we get Springer or Bauer? Or both.”
For instance, I love finding out (or tripping over) stuff about the history of the game that I never knew.
One of those topics is guys who almost never struck out.
Really. Like ALMOST NEVER.
In today's game, I noticed something amazing, which you may have already noticed:
2020 ended up with more than a K per inning for the entire major leagues: 15,586 Ks in 15,468 innings, a 9.06 K per 9 innings rate. Especially when you consider that All Time Great Tom Seaver averaged just 6.85 Ks per 9 IP in his career.
On the Mets, Pete Alonso sure crushes HRs but he has fanned 244 times in 805 plate appearances (a 30.3% rate). Not an unusual rate in today's game.
I did a Macks Mets article on Nellie Fox a while back, and amazingly, the Hall of Famer fanned just 216 times in 10,351 plate appearances. Incredible 2.1% career rate. Twelve seasons of 15 or fewer strikeouts. Crazy low. I figured he had to be the best K avoider ever.
Then I decided to look further. And I thought, "Whoa, Nellie!"
Joe Sewell seems to have been the King of Contact.
He had a beyond-crazy-low amount of Ks.
From 1925 thru 1933, his final season, he never fanned 10 times once in those 9 seasons. Let that sink in for a minute.
In two seasons, he fanned just 3 times. Three. His whole season combined did not add up to one Golden Sombrero.
In 3 other seasons, he fanned just 4 times, including his final season at age 34. And he got up plenty...616 times per season on average in those 9 seasons.
In those 9 years, he fanned 48 times. A total of 48 times, that is. So, for 9 years, he fanned just once every 115 plate appearances! On average, about once a month.
And he was productive, with a career of 8,333 plate appearances and 1,141 runs, 1,054 RBIs, and a .312 average - and just 114 Ks. Adam Dunn had more than 114 Ks by the All Star break one year. And in 2019, Detroit, with slightly over 6,000 plate appearances, fanned 1,595 times.
Joe Sewell never won an MVP but finished in the top 10 in MVP voting 4 times. He was voted into the Hall of Fame by the Veterans' Committee, in case you were wondering.
A non-household name, Charlie Hollocher, played for the Cubs from 1918-24, and retired at age 28. In his last 3 seasons, he fanned a total of 17 times and hit over .340 in 1922 and 1923. Sadly, he suffered from depression, which cut his career very short, and he committed suicide at age 40.
Lou Boudreau fanned as many as 57 times in a season early in his career, which spanned from 1938 to 1952.
At age 28, he started to fan at a very low rate, with just 60 Ks over his last 6 seasons, totaling 2,648 plate appearances, and he too made the Hall of Fame.
Mack's Mets readers might wonder if he got overly favorable writer consideration in getting into the Hall, especially since he played full seasons during WW II against watered down opposition. Per a NY Times articles, more than 500 major league baseball players served in the military during World War II, including stars like Ted Williams, Stan Musial and Joe DiMaggio.
Of course, DiMaggio also was elite in not fanning, as in 1941, he K’d just 13 times in 622 ABs.
And the incredible Tony Gwynn was the recent modern era King of Contact, with 8 seasons of less than 20 strikeouts between 1991 and 1999, utterly remarkable. And guess how many times Gwynn fanned against Pedro Martinez, Hideo Nomo, Mike Hampton, and Greg Maddox in 187 combined at bats?
If you guessed zero, you just went from zero to hero.
Different baseball eras had different challenges, and strikeouts were far more rare in the good old days. Just to pick one year, in 1922, there were just 6,935 Ks in 22,097 innings that season, or 2.82 Ks per 9 innings. That rate was just 31% the K rate of 2020.
So, assuming a rate of just 31% of today's K rate, Jeff McNeil in 2019 would have fanned just 23 (or fewer) times in 567 at bats in 2019, not the 75 times he did fan.
Safe to say that the hitters in the 1920s would have found 2020 baseball to be a tough thing to compete against. And would have struck out a whole lot more.
Safe to say that unless the major leagues someday requires 5 strikes for a batter to strike out, Joe Sewell's incredible non-strikeout records will never be approached.
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4 comments:
The strikeout avoidance has gone the way of hitting behind runners and stealing bases. Right now everyone launches at the church of launch angle because "chicks dig the long ball" as Tom Glavine once famously said. Big swings lead to big drafts when contact is not made. I like small ball.
Contact has its merits. I still can’t believe that over 4 very full seasons, Sewell fanned just 14 times.
I once read that Joe Sewell was called out on strikes on a pitch outside the zone and the umpire said "STRIKETHREEohmygodimissedit" in a single breath.
That is a funny story. It would have been so interesting to see Sewell in today's game. Put him thru a transporter beam into say 2019, and see how he'd fare against today's fireballers.
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