It’s time again for Baseball Roundtable’s Trivia(l) Tidbit Tuesday. I hope you are enjoying this weekly presentation of baseball occurrences that for some reason caught The Roundtable’s eye. (I’m particularly fond of unexpected performances and statistical coincidences.) These won’t necessarily be momentous occurrences, just events, statistics or coincidences that grabbed my attention. I’m also drawn to baseball “unicorns,” one-of-a-kind MLB accomplishments or statistics.
Photo: SD Dirk on Flickr (Original version) User UCinternational (Crop), CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Today, we are looking at some of MLB’s “strikeout artists” – defined, for our purposes, as pitchers who regularly racked up double-digit strikeouts in an outing. As the chart below shows, there have been only eight pitcher seasons of 20 or more games with 10+ strikeouts and – no surprise – four of them belong to Hall of Famer Randy Johnson. The Big Unit also shares the record for the most 10+ strikeouts games in a season at 23 – a feat he accomplished in three consecutive seasons 1999-2001. The only other pitcher to record 23 double-digit K games in a season was (another HOFer) Nolan Ryan in 1973. With today’s methods of “handling” pitchers, the record of 23 double-digit strikeouts games in a season seems pretty safe.
Consider, in 2001, there were 155 double-digit strikeout games by individual pitchers; there were five pitchers with at least eight such games (Randy Johnson – 23; Curt Schilling – 13; Pedro Martinez – 9; Kerry Wood – 8; Matt Morris – 8; and the pitcher with the 10+ Ks pitched at least seven innings in 81.3 percent of those games. By comparison, in 2024, there were 187 pitcher games with ten or more whiffs; no pitcher had more than six such outings (six for Blake Snell, Garret Crochet and Tyler Glasnow); and the pitcher with the 10+ Ks went at least seven innings in just 40.1 percent of the time
Here’s a few other tidbits that caught my eye as I researched this post:
- Most Strikeouts in any Ten-Game (pitched) Span: Nolan Ryan, Angels – May 19, 1977 – June 29, 1977… 123 in 84 1/3 innings pitched.
- Most Strikeouts in any Twenty-Game Span: Randy Johnson, Diamondbacks – April 13, 2001 – July 24, 2001 … 225 in 141 1/3 innings.
- Most Strikeouts in any Thirty-Game span: Randy Johnson, Diamondbacks – April 13, 2001 – September 17, 2001 AND June 25, 1999 – May 26, 2000 … 328 in 215 1/3 and 239 innings pitched, respectively. The only players besides Johnson to record 300 or more strikeouts in a span of 30 games are: Pedro Martinez (a high of 318), Nolan Ryan (a high of 311), Curt Schilling (a high of 310), Gerrit Cole (301). Note: All of these players except Cole have multiple 30-game spans with 300+ whiffs (many of those spans, of course, were overlapping).
Primary Resource: Stathead.com
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