Whiffs of Success? Theo Rolls the Dice

Jeff Sullivan recently sent up a warning flare regarding Kris Bryant’s potential swing and miss problems, and this post is essentially riffing off that one, so you’ll probably want to read that first if you haven’t already checked it out. I’m using strikeout rate rather than contact rate, but the message is similar.

Bryant isn’t alone among Cubs prospects with contact avoidance issues. Here’s what some of their bigger names did last year:

Player                                        Level            K%             wRC+

Javier Baez                             MLB            41.0                 51

Arismendy Alcantara        MLB            31.0                 70

Jorge Soler                             MLB            24.7               146

Kris Bryant                                 AAA            28.6               164

Three of those four (i.e., the non-Alcantaras) are thought to be integral parts of The Future for the Cubs. But those are strikeout rates that have not generally led to long-term career success.

Here are the top ten career K rates for hitters with over 5000 plate appearances:

Player                            K%           wRC+          WAR

Adam Dunn               28.6            123              22.7

Ryan Howard           28.1             126              19.9

Jose Hernandez      27.3              86              12.9

Carlos Pena               26.8             117              16.9

B.J. Upton                  26.4              99              21.7

Jim Thome                 24.7            145              67.7

Dave Kingman          24.4            113              20.4

Gorman Thomas      24.4            114              20.4

Dan Uggla                   24.2             110              22.8

Dean Palmer             24.2             104              11.0

So it’s not impossible to have a long and relatively successful career striking out more than a quarter of the time, but it hasn’t happened much – just five times using my admittedly somewhat arbitrary 5000 PA cutoff. With strikeout rates continuing to rise, a few more players will edge ahead of Dean Palmer in the coming years, but in all likelihood, many more will fall by the wayside long before reaching that somewhat less than august plateau. As Sullivan points out, players who whiff this often need to max out their other skills in order to be useful to a team, putting enormous pressure on those other skills to develop.

And there does seem to be a correlation between hitters’ strikeout rates and overall team success, as Joe Sheehan has noted elsewhere. Here are the teams with the five highest hitter K rates from last year:

Cubs               24.2          73-89

Astros            23.8          70-92

Marlins          22.9          77-85

Braves            22.6          79-83

Reinsdorfs     22.4          73-89

None of these teams came close to making the playoffs. You have to go all the way down to tenth on the list to find a playoff team (the Nats, at 21.0%).

And here are the five least K-lacious teams:

Royals             16.3        89-73

A’s                    17.7        88-74

Rays                 18.1        77-85

Tigers              18.3        90-72

Cards               18.6       90-72

Yankees           18.6       84-78

Numerate readers will have grasped that there are actually six teams on this list, since the Cards and Yankees tied at 18.6%.  Only the Rays and the Evil Empire failed to make the playoffs, and only the Rays failed to break .500.

Not all of the young Cubs  windmill at the plate: Addison Russell and Kyle Schwarber kept their K rates under 20% last year in the minors, as did Anthony Rizzo and Starlin Castro in the majors. And as Sullivan noted, players do develop – Bryant et. al. are not necessarily trapped for eternity in the seventh level of Strikeout Hell. But for now, a significant part Theo Epstein’s plan to bring glory to Wrigleyville depends on whether these players can either find a way to strike out less, or to succeed without doing so, something that few have managed thus far.