Comments on: RIP: The Extreme Contact Starting Pitcher

By: Baseball-Reference Blog » Blog Archive » When Will We Never See One Super Contact Hitter?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:41:14 +0000

[...] with Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Batting Season Finder, and doing the flip-side of yesterday's fun, I looked for how many times each season, since 1901, has a batter qualified for the batting title [...]

By: DavidRF

DavidRF — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:39:45 +0000

Rich, JDV agrees with you. Notice he used the world "used to be".

Times really have changed. You just have to think check out the AB/SO list and see where the top three active hitters rank on the all-time list. Juan Pierre (16.43) is #196th, Placido Polanco is #296th (14.09), Paul Lo Duca (13.19) is 339th. These guys seem like scientific hitters to me, but none of them are in the same galaxy as Joe Sewell (62.56) or Lloyd Waner (44.92).

On the pitchers side, I would have thought from watching Carlos Silva that he'd have to be an extreme contact pitcher, but somehow he managed to strikeout 3.5 to 4 batters per 9 IP.

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:40:55 +0000

"I have to agree with Gerry. It used to be that the hitter's job was to make contact at all costs, because anything can happen when you put the ball in play." Except for the fact that the great hitters always tend to strike out a lot. Putting the ball in play cause "anything can happen" is a nice strategy for little league because the fielders are so awful, but it doesn't really work in the major leagues when fielders make just about every play. Also, pitchers ARE trying to strike more batters out because they realize there's no luck involved with a strikeout.

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:02:55 +0000

Rueter was a classic low-strikeout guy.

By: wboenig

wboenig — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:10:35 +0000

Randy Jones is an extreme example of a contact pitcher; he is the only pitcher since 1928 to rack up 300+ innings in one season (1976) while still striking out fewer than 100 batters.

By: Steve Lombardi

Steve Lombardi — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:40:18 +0000

Interesting points, through and through, Salvo.

By: salvo

salvo — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:37:45 +0000

I was looking at this exact thing a week or so ago, and discussing it with a couple of buddies, and for us, the mystery wasn't so much that the extreme-low-K pitcher was so rare---strikeouts have been trending up forever, especially since after the early- to mid-'50s---but rather why, after pretty much zero extreme-low-K starters in the 1960s (they had been going rapidly extinct for a decade), all of a sudden several showed up in the mid-'70s, followed by a (relative) explosion of them from 1978-1983 or so... It's not as if the trends (hitting styles, etc.) that were developing and continuing through the 1960s all of a sudden reversed.. so what was it? I ended up settling on the introduction of the DH in 1973 acting as a temporary "speed bump" in the extreme-low-K-pitcher extinction process... the K rate dipped across both leagues in the mid-'70s, but more dramtaically in the AL, and it was longer to recover than in the NL. And as it turns out, with the exception of Jim Barr with the Giants, the bulk of the extreme-low-K starters were in the AL....

By: Afternoon Links « Caught Looking

Afternoon Links « Caught Looking — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:07:31 +0000

[...] up today, Baseball Reference’s Stat of the Day looks into the death of the extreme contact pitcher. I’m real surprised Zach Duke [...]

By: JDV

JDV — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:47:44 +0000

I have to agree with Gerry. It used to be that the hitter's job was to make contact at all costs, because anything can happen when you put the ball in play. Today, it's more like 'make your swing count', because your salary is based on the number of big results, with little penalty for strikeouts. It's like taking a standardized test with instructions that say, "answer every question; there is no penalty for wrong answers".

By: Gerry

Gerry — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:20:30 +0000

I'm not sure that we're talking about a type of pitcher as much as about a style of hitting. Strikeouts have gone up more because of the way batters swing than the way pitchers throw (in my opinion). I'm glad to see 1924 at the top of the list. That was the year Dazzy Vance struck out more batters than the next two pitchers (in his league) combined. Never happened before or since.