Nolan Ryan’s name is never far from the conversation about unbreakable records. His seven no-hitters are nearly double the amount thrown by any other pitcher in major-league history (Sandy Koufax is the only other pitcher as many as four). To surpass Ryan’s 5,714 career strikeouts, a pitcher would have to average 286 a year for 20 years — Ryan pitched for 27 seasons, of course, another record. His most unbreakable record is likely his 2,795 career walks, which are a whopping 52 percent higher than runner-up Steve Carlton’s 1,833. No pitcher has surpassed 125 walks in a season since 1992. To break Ryan’s career-walks mark, one would have to average 140 per season for 20 years.
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Ryan’s modern single-season record for strikeouts, 383 set in 1973 with the Angels, is not typically considered one of his unbreakable marks. It’s not difficult to see why. Randy Johnson fell just 11 K’s short of that total in 2001, striking out 372. That year, there were a record 32,404 strikeouts in the major leagues. That record was broken in 2007 and has been broken again every year since. Last year, there were 40,104 strikeouts in the majors.
Strikeouts have lost their stigma for hitters. That, in concert with the increased velocity and specialization of pitchers, has sent strikeout rates on a seemingly never-ending upward trajectory. It would thus stand to reason that the single-season strikeout record for pitchers will soon meet the same fate as the single-season strikeout record for hitters.
In 1969 and 1970, his first two full seasons, Giants right fielder Bobby Bonds struck out 187 and 189 times. The latter stood as the single-season record for hitters for 34 years, a mark of shame to be avoided at all costs, with more than one hitter who came close sitting out late-season games to avoid the infamy of breaking Bonds’ mark. In 2004, three-true-outcome superstar and sabermetric darling Adam Dunn finally broke the record with 195. In the 13 seasons since, Bonds’ total has been surpassed another 25 times. Yet Ryan’s 383 still stands and, despite the rising majors-wide strikeout trend, is in no danger of falling anytime soon.
The safety of Ryan’s single-season strikeout record became clear to me late last week, when I was compiling some of the comically outlandish “on-pace” figures around the majors. Record paces were easy to find for hits, homers, walks and strikeouts by hitters, runs, RBIs, doubles, total bases, extra-base hits, wild pitches, home runs and stolen bases allowed, relief appearances, and saves. Yet no pitcher was on pace to come particularly close to Ryan’s 383. That remains true after the completion of the weekend’s series.
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Heading into Monday’s action, the starter on the most aggressive strikeout pace was the Astros’ Gerrit Cole. He had struck out 11 men in each of his first two starts. If he continued that way, Cole would be on pace to strike out 385 batters this season should he make 35 starts. However, he is not only extremely unlikely to keep up that pace, he’s also almost guaranteed to make fewer starts.
If a team stays on turn with a five-man rotation through 162 games, its top two starters will each make 33 starts while the other three will make 32. Cole’s season debut came in the Astros’ fourth game of the season. His current pace is for 32 starts and 352 strikeouts, 31 fewer than Ryan’s 1973 mark and, again, his strikeout pace is sure to slow significantly.
On a per-inning basis, Noah Syndergaard entered his Monday night start leading all pitchers to have made multiple starts this season with 15.3 strikeouts per nine innings. At that pace, he’d need to throw just 225 1/3 innings to surpass Ryan’s record. However, Syndergaard, the Mets’ Opening Day starter, was only on pace to throw 165 innings over 33 starts prior to Monday night.
This is where we run into the key reason that Ryan’s single-season strikeout record is so unbreakable. Strikeouts are inefficient. In an era in which pitch- and inning-counts are monitored carefully, particularly for the fireballing young arms who typically post the highest strikeout rates, high strikeout totals can actually inhibit a pitcher’s ability to compile high innings totals.
Syndergaard’s second start is an extreme example. It took him 92 pitches to get through four innings, striking out seven. His day was done at that point despite not allowing a run in his final inning of work and striking out the last batter he faced. (He worked more efficiently Monday night, in part by inducing more contact, needing just 90 pitches to get through six innings but striking out just five, thus dropping his strikeout rate on the season to 12.5 K/9.) Since Randy Johnson struck out 11.6 men per nine innings across 260 frames in 2002, the highest innings total for a pitcher with at least 11.0 K/9 was Clayton Kershaw’s 232 2/3 innings in 2015. Kershaw struck out 301 men that season, 82 fewer than Ryan’s record, and hasn’t replicated that strikeout rate nor had a completely healthy season since.
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That interaction between strikeouts and efficiency is likely behind another curious trend, which I’ll illustrate using a series of graphs.
To begin with, most baseball fans are familiar with the fact that strikeout rates have been rising along with the frequency and extent of reliever usage. Here’s what those trends look like from 1973, the year of Ryan’s record-setting strikeout total, through 2017.
MLB average K/9, 1973-2017
Percentage of batters faced by relief pitchers across MLB
It follows that an increase in relief pitching results in a decrease in starter workloads. That has been true not just for the average major league starter but for the elite starters as well. Here’s a look at the major league leading innings pitched totals since 1973 (the two dramatic dips are the strike years of 1981 and ’94).
Major league leading innings pitched totals since 1973
That downward trend in league-leading innings totals might suggest a corresponding rise in league-leading strikeout rates. Yet, while league-average strikeout rates for starting pitchers have indeed increased steadily in recent years, the league-leading K/9 figures for qualified pitchers don’t follow the same trend line.
Major league leading K/9 since 1973
There is a slight upward trend over the entire 45-season sample. But from 1984 (Dwight Gooden’s 11.4 K/9) to 2015 (Chris Sale’s 11.8 K/9), the graph largely plateaus. The apparent upward trend at the end stems in part from the fact that 10.8 K/9 was a major league leading figure as recently as 2014. Only the last two seasons show a significant upward trend, and the league-leading total from 2016 was the 12.5 K/9 posted by José Fernández in 182 1/3 innings prior to his death that September. The runner-up that year was Arizona’s Robbie Ray at a fairly conventional 11.3 K/9.
The big hump around the turn of the century is almost all Randy Johnson, a historically unique pitcher in his own right. Johnson’s 13.4 K/9 in 2001 remains the single-season record for a qualified pitcher. The only other qualified starter ever to reach 13.0 K/9 was Pedro Martínez with 13.2 K/9 in 1999. Sale came close last year, with 12.9 K/9, but he also led the majors with just 214 1/3 innings (exactly one inning more than Martínez threw in 1999). As a result, Sale’s 308 strikeouts fell 75 shy of Ryan’s record, just as Martínez’s 313 in 1999 fell 70 shy of Ryan’s mark. Johnson’s record of 13.4 K/9 may yet fall in the very near future. But, per that downward trend in league-leading innings totals, it seems increasingly likely that the pitcher who breaks Johnson’s K/9 record will fall shy of even Sale’s underwhelming 2017 innings total.
Before we get too excited about the prospect of a qualified starter striking out 14 men per nine innings (or even just 13.5), I have one last graph to share. This one illustrates the relationship between the average strikeout rate and the major league leading figures above by presenting those league-leading K/9 totals as a percentage of league average.
MLB-leading K/9 as a percentage of MLB-average K/9
The clear downward trend above reveals a stagnation of those league-leading K/9 figures relative to league average. That trend is the result of the denominator of this particular ratio (the league-average strikeout rate) growing much faster than the numerator (the league-leading strikeout rates). When Ryan struck out 383 men in 1973 and Johnson struck out 372 in 2001, both recorded strikeouts at twice the league-average rate. When Sale struck out 308 last year, the most in the majors since Johnson’s 334 in 2002, he struck out just 55 percent more batters per nine innings than the average major-league starter.
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The impression this gives is that there might be a practical limit to the percentage of outs a major-league pitcher can record via strikeout over the course of a full season. After all, even if the game completely devolves into a three-true-outcome contest, some of those would-be home runs are going to fall into outfielders’ gloves, preventing the pitcher on duty from recording every out via the strikeout. Meanwhile, even with the increased reliance on relief pitching in today’s game, efficiency is crucial to compiling a 200-inning season, or even a 180-inning season. That means getting some portion of outs via one- or two-pitch at-bats via balls in play or via double plays.
For now, Johnson’s 2001 season represents that limit. Johnson recorded 372 of 749 outs via strikeout that year, just shy of 50 percent. Ryan’s 383 strikeouts came in 326 innings and thus accounted for just 39 percent of his outs that season. Even if a pitcher does manage to record 50 percent of his outs via strikeout in the near future, he’d still need to throw 255 1/3 innings to match Ryan’s 383. The last pitcher to throw more than 255 innings was Roy Halladay in 2003. Halladay recorded just 25.6 percent of his outs via the strikeout that season.
The established limit isn’t significantly higher even among this era’s dominant short relievers. Aroldis Chapman’s 17.7 K/9 in 2014 stands as the record for a pitcher with more than 13 innings pitched. He struck out 106 men in 54 innings that year; that’s still just 65.4 percent of his outs via strikeout. To break Ryan’s record, a pitcher would have to sustain that rate over 195 2/3 innings, or 3.6 times as many frames as Chapman pitched in 2014. We are much closer to seeing a league-leading innings total below 195 than we are to seeing a starting pitcher record 65 percent of his outs via strikeout.
Given that, it would seem that the only way to break Ryan’s single-season strikeout record is to reverse the current trend toward reduced workloads for starting pitchers. The hidden history here is that seven pitchers have actually surpassed Ryan’s 383 strikeouts in a season. Five of them did so in 1884, the first year that overhand pitching was allowed in the major leagues; the other two did it in 1886. All seven men needed more than 500 innings to surpass 383.
Cal Ripken Jr. proved that no record is unbreakable. But as workloads continue to diminish, Ryan’s strikeout records, including his single-season mark, look more and more like relics of another era — records as unbreakable as those of the workhorses of the 19th century, his 383 strikeouts among them.
(Top photo of Ryan: MLB Photos via Getty Images)
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