Suffering through the post-season with little to do but monitor the Hot Stove League developments and the Hall of Fame ballot debates, I find myself thankful for Baseball Reference and its treasure of information. While perusing the Hall of Fame Batting Statistics, I was not surprised to see that Reggie Jackson leads all members with 2,597 strikeouts, but I was a little surprised to notice that Jackson recorded 13 more strikeouts in his career than he did hits: 2,584. This naturally led me to wonder which Hall of Famers had the lowest career strikeout rates.
After downloading the stats and adding a strikeout percentage per plate appearances column to the spreadsheet, I realized that I needed to limit the query to only those batters with at least 6,000 career plate appearances in order to omit the many pitchers who played in the pre-DH era. I also chose to limit the query to those players whose careers lasted until at least 1970 in order to focus on just those batters who have had to do battle against the modern science and strategies of major league pitching.
The following list of 49 Hall of Fame members is ranked from lowest to highest strikeout rate per plate appearances:
Rank | Name | PA | SO | SO % |
1 | Tony Gwynn | 10232 | 434 | 4.24% |
2 | Ozzie Smith | 10778 | 589 | 5.46% |
3 | Luis Aparicio | 11230 | 742 | 6.61% |
4 | Wade Boggs | 10740 | 745 | 6.94% |
5 | George Brett | 11625 | 908 | 7.81% |
6 | Brooks Robinson | 11782 | 990 | 8.40% |
7 | Bill Mazeroski | 8379 | 706 | 8.43% |
8 | Al Kaline | 11596 | 1020 | 8.80% |
9 | Joe Morgan | 11329 | 1015 | 8.96% |
10 | Barry Larkin | 9057 | 817 | 9.02% |
11 | Tim Raines | 10359 | 966 | 9.33% |
12 | Rod Carew | 10550 | 1028 | 9.74% |
13 | Hank Aaron | 13941 | 1383 | 9.92% |
14 | Billy Williams | 10519 | 1046 | 9.94% |
15 | Carl Yastrzemski | 13992 | 1393 | 9.96% |
16 | Cal Ripken, Jr. | 12883 | 1305 | 10.13% |
17 | Paul Molitor | 12167 | 1244 | 10.22% |
18 | Roberto Alomar | 10400 | 1140 | 10.96% |
19 | Robin Yount | 12249 | 1350 | 11.02% |
20 | Gary Carter | 9019 | 997 | 11.05% |
21 | Eddie Murray | 12817 | 1516 | 11.83% |
22 | Ernie Banks | 10394 | 1236 | 11.89% |
23 | Roberto Clemente | 10211 | 1230 | 12.05% |
24 | Willie Mays | 12496 | 1526 | 12.21% |
25 | Kirby Puckett | 7831 | 965 | 12.32% |
26 | Joe Torre | 8802 | 1094 | 12.43% |
27 | Rickey Henderson | 13346 | 1694 | 12.69% |
28 | Frank Robinson | 11742 | 1532 | 13.05% |
29 | Orlando Cepeda | 8698 | 1169 | 13.44% |
30 | Ryne Sandberg | 9282 | 1260 | 13.57% |
31 | Dave Winfield | 12358 | 1686 | 13.64% |
32 | Frank Thomas | 10075 | 1397 | 13.87% |
33 | Andre Dawson | 10769 | 1509 | 14.01% |
34 | Craig Biggio | 12504 | 1753 | 14.02% |
35 | Carlton Fisk | 9853 | 1386 | 14.07% |
36 | Ron Santo | 9397 | 1343 | 14.29% |
37 | Ivan Rodriguez | 10270 | 1474 | 14.35% |
38 | Mike Piazza | 7745 | 1113 | 14.37% |
39 | Johnny Bench | 8674 | 1278 | 14.73% |
40 | Lou Brock | 11240 | 1730 | 15.39% |
41 | Jim Rice | 9058 | 1423 | 15.71% |
42 | Ken Griffey, Jr. | 11304 | 1779 | 15.74% |
43 | Willie McCovey | 9692 | 1550 | 15.99% |
44 | Jeff Bagwell | 9431 | 1558 | 16.52% |
45 | Tony Perez | 10861 | 1867 | 17.19% |
46 | Harmon Killebrew | 9833 | 1699 | 17.28% |
47 | Mike Schmidt | 10062 | 1883 | 18.71% |
48 | Willie Stargell | 9027 | 1936 | 21.45% |
49 | Reggie Jackson | 11418 | 2597 | 22.74% |
The list of batters on the 2018 Hall of Fame ballot ranked in the same way:
Rank | Name | PA | SO | SO % |
1 | Omar Vizquel | 12013 | 1087 | 9.05% |
2 | Gary Sheffield | 10947 | 1171 | 10.70% |
3 | Vladimir Guerrero | 9059 | 985 | 10.87% |
4 | Johnny Damon | 10917 | 1257 | 11.51% |
5 | Barry Bonds | 12606 | 1539 | 12.21% |
6 | Chipper Jones | 10614 | 1409 | 13.27% |
7 | Edgar Martinez | 8674 | 1202 | 13.86% |
8 | Larry Walker | 8030 | 1231 | 15.33% |
9 | Jeff Kent | 9537 | 1522 | 15.96% |
10 | Scott Rolen | 8518 | 1410 | 16.55% |
11 | Fred McGriff | 10174 | 1882 | 18.50% |
12 | Manny Ramirez | 9774 | 1813 | 18.55% |
13 | Andruw Jones | 8664 | 1748 | 20.18% |
14 | Sammy Sosa | 9896 | 2306 | 23.30% |
15 | Jim Thome | 10313 | 2548 | 24.71% |
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