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| | Monday, September 6 History's strikeout kings | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Randy Johnson is chasing Nolan Ryan's single-season record of 383 strikeouts. Pedro Martinez is compiling one of the great strikeout rates of all time. No reliever has have ever fanned hitters like Billy Wagner. Who are history's greatest strikeouts pitchers? Conveniently enough, in compiling a list of baseball's 10 greatest strikeout pitchers, we can choose one from each decade of the century.
1900s: Rube Waddell But his story goes beyond statistics. "Rube Waddell would have been as great a pitcher as Walter Johnson if only he had had the sense God give a rabbit," wrote Bill James in the Historical Baseball Abstract. "It is sad to realize that Rube Waddell could not exist today, that in the eyes of modern men he would be given an appropriate label and properly taken care of, his competition limited to heaving a rubber-tipped javelin in the Special Olympics."
1910s: Walter Johnson How fast did Johnson throw? Some speculate that with his whip-like motion there was no way he threw more than 85 mph. Johnson may also have been one of the first pitchers to throw hard on every pitch, rather than conserving your speed for the critical moments, which made his fastball appear more impressive to hitters of his time. Regardless of how fast he really threw, nobody ever led his league in strikeouts as often as Johnson's 12 times.
1920s: Dazzy Vance
1930s: Lefty Grove He pitched in an era when hitters rarely struck out, so he reached 200 strikeouts in a season only once, but no pitcher was more feared. Many hitters of the time said Grove threw harder than Johnson or Bob Feller.
1940s: Bob Feller
Feller's fastball rates at the top of the list for fastest ever, but he also threw a big curveball and later added a slider. From 1939-1941, he won 76 games and led the league in K's each year. He then volunteered for duty as a naval gunner in World War II, missing nearly four complete years of his career -- arguably his prime years, from ages 23 to 26. He returned in 1946 and threw 371 innings and 36 complete games. That season may have taken a toll as Rapid Robert never fanned more than 200 batters again and had his last big season at 32.
1950s: Herb Score What's impressive about Score's strikeout total is when you compare it to other starting pitchers in the league. In 1955, he averaged 9.70 strikeouts per nine innings; Bob Turley was second at 7.66 and only one other pitcher was higher than 6.0. In 1956, Score averaged 9.49 K's per nine and only Camilo Pascual was also above 6.50. Sadly, Score's career was derailed by a line drive from Gil McDougald's bat that struck him in the eye on May 7, 1957. He didn't pitch again that season and legend attributes Score's problems afterwards to that fateful liner. Except that's not really what happened. Early in the 1958 season, Score experienced soreness in his forearm on a wet night in Washington. Then came soreness in his elbow. Then came a torn elbow tendon. Score said that he never recovered his mechanics and velocity after that.
1960s: Sandy Koufax
1970s: Nolan Ryan When he was with the California Angels in the mid-'70s, he may have been the scariest pitcher ever. He threw 100 mph and his control wasn't exactly pinpoint. He fanned over 300 hitters five times in six seasons from 1972 through 1977 -- and averaged 173 walks per season (oh, if only we had pitch counts from some of those games). Of course, Ryan's durability cemented his legendary status long after his days with the Angels. He fanned 301 batters in 1989 at the age of 42 and led the league for the final time when he was 43.
1980s: Roger Clemens Clemens is the quintessential power pitcher, with a 96-mph fastball that he locates all over the strike zone, a nasty four-seam fastball and a split-fingered pitch that he likes to use with two strikes. In this age of offensive explosives, Clemens deserves consideration as not only the greatest pitcher of his era, but of all time.
1990s: Randy Johnson His career strikeout rate of 10.76 per nine innings is easily the best ever, beating Ryan's 9.55. Johnson holds three of the four highest single-season strikeout rates. And this year, he has a shot at Ryan's record of 383. It took awhile for him to become great and he turns 36 this year, but he still has a chance of reaching the Hall of Fame.
Five more Amos Rusie: The "Hoosier Thunderbolt" threw so hard that they changed the rules. In 1893, the pitching distance was moved back five feet and six inches to its present distance, in large part because Rusie's speed. Rusie led the NL five times in strikeouts and sat out three seasons in contract disputes. Smokey Joe Williams: Williams pitched in the Negro Leagues from 1897 to 1932, and a 1952 poll of veteran black players and sportswriters named him the best black pitcher of all time -- better than Satchel Paige. Williams threw harder than Paige and recorded a 19-7 record against white big leaguers in exhibition games. He once fanned 20 in 10 innings against the NL champion New York Giants and fanned 27 Kansas City Monarchs in a 12-inning game in 1930. Sam McDowell: Sudden Sam topped the AL five times in K's with the Indians from 1965-1970, including a career-high 325 in 1965. McDowell's career rate of 8.86 K's per nine innings is topped only by Johnson, Ryan and Koufax. Billy Wagner: In 1997, the diminuitive lefty set a record of 14.4 K's per nine innings with a minimum 50 innings pitched. Last year, he upped that to 14.5. This season, Wagner has 104 strikeouts in 61.2 innings, an amazing rate of 15.2 per game. Wow. And finally ... Steve Dalkowski: Who? Probably the hardest thrower in baseball history, Dalkowski was once reportedly clocked at 108 mph while pitching for Class A Elmira in 1962. He was a short left-hander who wore glasses and was as wild as a drunken frat boy at a toga party. Dalkowski never reached the majors due to his inability to throw the ball over the plate and that led to a career minor-league record of 46-80. In fact, his pitching lines are so amazing let's check them out:
YEAR CLUB CL G IP H BB SO W L ERA
1957 Kingsport D 15 62 22 129 121 1 8 8.13
1958 Knoxville A 11 42 17 95 82 1 4 7.93
Wilson B 8 14 7 38 29 0 1 12.21
Aberdeen C 11 62 29 112 121 3 5 6.39
1959 Aberdeen C 12 59 30 110 99 4 3 5.64
Pensacola D 7 25 11 80 43 0 4 12.96
1960 Stockton C 32 170 105 262 262 7 15 5.14
1961 Kennewick B 31 103 75 196 150 3 12 8.39
1962 Elmira A 31 160 117 114 192 7 10 3.04
1963 Elmira AA 13 29 20 26 28 2 2 2.79
Rochester AAA 12 12 7 14 8 0 2 6.00
1964 Elmira AA 8 15 17 19 16 0 1 6.00
Stockton A 20 108 91 62 141 8 4 2.83
Columbus AAA 3 12 15 11 9 2 1 8.25
1965 Kennewick A 16 84 84 52 62 6 5 5.14
San Jose A 6 38 35 34 33 2 3 4.74
In '57, Dalkowski walked 21 and threw six wild pitches in a 9-7 loss to Wytheville. Later that year, he walked 18 in a game -- but fanned 24 to win 7-5. The only bout of success Dalkowski ever had was with Elmira in 1962. He pitched for Earl Weaver that year, and according to Bill James in his Guide to Baseball Managers, Weaver discovered that Dalkowski had an IQ of about 60 (sound familiar?).
Weaver realized that Dalkowski had been given too much information to digest and told him to worry only about his fastball and slider and throwing strikes. According to Weaver, in his final 57 innings at Elmira, Dalkowski struck out 110 batters, walked 11 and had an ERA of 0.11. In spring training the next year, Dalkowski hurt his arm and the fastball was gone. |  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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