The chart below is filtered for starters only. A lot more people got votes, but this wasnt as close as the two previous votes. This stat is more straightforward in its calculation. In fact, his 5.37 strikeout-to-walk ratio is the best in MLB history (min. Its possible that neither pitcher crumbles in the strikeout category, but, if there is a decline, we now see how it would happen. Using FanGraphs custom leaderboards and Baseball Prospectus' Whiff/Swing, I ran regressions for 2012 for K% against percentage of fastballs thrown (FA%), percentage of sliders thrown (SL%), average fastball velocity (vFA), overall strike rate (Strike%), overall swing rate (Swing%), first strike rate (F-Strike%), Horizontal and Vertical pitch movement (H Mov and V Mov, respectively), walk rate (BB%) and finally, SwStr% and Whiff/Swing. Most of the time, having more and more information is a good thing the prospect of successful projection really increases as we get more and more information to learn from. Second, strikeouts and walks are important because they are stable predictors of success. The correlation between K% and wOBA for that same sample of batters is small at r = .12, suggesting that if anything wOBA increases by the slightest margin as K% increases. Looking at the Wagonmaker's K% for his career, we see that his K/9 is misleading. Jugs Perfect Strike pitching machine with Pear balls, Redbirds Return to Florida for FAUs Strike-Out Cancer Tournament, 7th GRADE CRUISER CLASSIC "STRIKE OUT CANCER". Thus, there are many different ways in which a pitcher can make this list. 1-2 strikeouts per inning is very good, but ERA and WHIP (walks/hits per inning pitched) are better indicators of pitching success. Strikeouts = not bad for batters. Because many years ago, Voros McCracken discovered that pitchers have far less control over what happens to the ball after it leaves the bat than we had previously thought. Plate Discipline Terms at draftkings.com/sportsbook. Instead, K% is a straightforward calculation that simply looks at the percentage share of opposition batsmen the pitcher strikes out. One of the most important elements of fantasy baseball is how to handle prospects, you can potentially add a league winner in the middle of the season for free. Terrific Tom once set an MLB record by striking out 10 batters in a row, and he even was praised by one of baseballs all-time greats. He had 24.4 WAR through his first five years and -4.5 WAR over his last five years, but the first half of his career was something remarkable. There may be many ways to skin a cat, train a fly, kill a man, etc, but it appears that there is only one solid and reliable way to strike batters out to make them whiff on pitches. All of these have the same result an out but only one of them generates oohs and ahhs. Baseball has been around since 1871, so any time something happens for the first time, its pretty remarkable. window.PLAYERCARDS_CONFIG={affiliateCode:"fpros_cards"}; Copyright 2010- FantasyPros.com Pablo Lopez is the rare example of a player who dropped his strikeout rate significantly from the prior two seasons but posted the highest swinging strike percentage of his career. .