Thursday, June 09, 2005

Fun with baseball numbers

You can't look at an internet sports page today without seeing that Alex Rodriquez, the future hall of fame third baseman for the New York Yankees, started a new baseball "club." He's the first player to reach 400 home runs before turning thirty years old. Pretty big deal, I guess but the Babe would have also if he hadn't wasted those couple of years pitching for the Red Sox. I went ahead and looked at Rodriguez' statistics and noticed he doesn't strikeout all that much for a slugger. Then I wondered how many times the great Pujols strikes out (he's a young hitter for the Cardinals). I saw that Pujols makes Rodriguez look like Jose Canseco. Rodriguez is good for over 100 strikeouts a year but Pujols, who averages over thirty homeruns a year, has yet to strikeout 100 times in one season. In fact last year he hit 47 homeruns and only struck out 52 times. This caused me to wonder if anyone has ever had more homeruns than strikeouts in a single season. Hello, baseball reference!

Guys that have done it:
George Brett in 1980 with 24 dingers and 22 strikeouts.
Don Mattingly didn't do in 1985 but he did hit 35 homers with only 41 strikeouts and that's pretty darn good.
Yogi Berra did it a lot. In 1950 he hit 28 homeruns with 12 K's! 1951: 27 and 20. 1952 30 and 24. 27 and 20 in 1955 and 30 and 29 in 1956. In 1957 he showed off by strking out as often as he homered which was 24 times.
Ted Williams in 1941 not only batted over .400 but he also hit 37 homeruns and stuckout 27 times. In 1950 he had the ratio of 28 to 21. 1955 28 and 24.

That's all I've found. There might be a few more out there.

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