It’s not how fast, it’s how many

His name is synonymous with strikeout. He pitched a perfect game in his senior year of high school, ultimately helping him get selected in the third round of the 1982 draft. However, he chose to go to USC, holding off his major league debut until 1988. This former teammate of Mark McGwire even made his acting debut in the movie “Little Big League.” Think you know who it is?It seems so simple: throw a ball inside an imaginary box over home plate. Face it—if we could do it with any consistency, we would be making eight figures, not five or six. But instead of the big paychecks, the reward for those of us who play Fantasy Baseball is leveraging the talent and skill of these stars for our teams’ statistics.

One of the stats counted in most leagues is the strikeout—and not many pitchers know more about strikeouts than Randy Johnson. In addition, Johnson is one of the best Fantasy players at maximizing the K/9 ratio, which I consider one of the most important stats in evaluating a pitcher.
Standing a dominating 6 feet, 10 inches, Johnson intimidates batters and changes the game by his very presence in it. What’s important to us is his ability to rack up strikeouts while having a low ERA and WHIP. Wins is the fourth category he accumulates for us, but let’s face it, he’s drafted for his strikeouts and strikeouts are what we are here to talk about today.

The new trend in Fantasy Baseball is to draft strong in offense and pick up your pitching along the way. One of the ideas behind this theory is that unlike offensive categories where you can only make up ground by plugging in players on off days and doubleheaders with pitching categories, the importance is on the rate at which you accumulate the stats. Most standard Fantasy Baseball leagues have a maximum of 162 games at each position and a maximum number of innings you can use (normally 1250 to 2000), depending on league and roster size.

In leagues that have an innings-pitched maximum, the most important thing is to use every inning allotted to your team by getting the most out of each one. In the early part of the season, being over or under your projected innings limit is really irrelevant. What IS important is that no innings are wasted. Pitchers that don’t go enough innings to qualify for the win are only contributing three of four possible categories. I focus on starting pitching here because relief pitchers may or may not qualify for a win or save depending on game circumstances and cannot be anticipated and projected like wins.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could have all our starters go the minimum in innings to qualify for the win—with the lowest possible ERA and WHIP—while getting the most strikeouts per inning?

To simplify what I mean by maximize your strikeouts per inning, you should strive for a pitcher that strikes out as many batters per nine innings as possible. A general rule of thumb is to target six strikeouts per nine innings pitched—in other words, the K/9 ratio.

At any time in the season, it’s easy to check your team’s and your opponents’ K/9 ratio. Remember that it’s the rate you accumulate the strikeout, not how fast the strikeouts occur in the season.

A good K/9 ratio is just like the fable about the tortoise and the hare. In this story the hare jumps way out in the lead using his precious innings on bad starts and poor match-ups—but worst of all, on pitchers who have poor K/9 ratios.

For example, let’s say the season is 25% complete. The hare has used 600 of a 1200-inning max limit, and he has a total of 400 Ks. By comparison, the tortoise has used 300 innings with 250 strikeouts. Who is better off?

Let me show you a great way to find out.

First, take the hare’s total number of innings used and divide by nine. This will give you the number of nine-inning outings his team has had:

600/9 = 66.67 nine-inning outings

Next, divide the total number of strikeouts by the number of nine-inning outings to get the hare’s K/9 ratio:

400/66.67 = 6 strikeouts per nine innings

Now take the tortoise’s total number of innings used and divide by nine.

300/9 = 33.33 nine-inning outings

Finally, divide the tortoise’s strikeouts by the number of nine-inning outings:

250/33.33 = 7.5 strikeouts per nine innings

What does this mean to you? The hare has many more points than the tortoise in strikeouts, but should the tortoise be worried? Not at all—the hare has used half of his available innings already and will be forced to slow his pace or run out of innings halfway through the season. The tortoise, meanwhile, is on pace to finish with exactly 1200 innings used, and his K/9 ratio is higher than the hare’s (7.5 vs. 6). The tortoise will ultimately pass the hare and win back those points.

You can take it a step further and check each pitcher on your roster using the same formula. Identify who is weak on your roster using the K/9 ratio, then trade or pick up an adequate replacement pitcher to help bring up your teams average.

Wondering why Nolan Ryan’s name wasn’t mentioned as having been synonymous with the term Strike Out? Nolan Ryan pitched 5,386 innings in his major league career and threw 5,714 strikeouts; by comparison, Randy Johnson has pitched 3,798 innings coming into the year with 4,544 strike outs. If you use the formula above, you will see my reasoning for having chosen Randy Johnson over Nolan Ryan

To some, the art of the strikeout is to paint corners and throw with pinpoint control. To me, the art of the strikeout is the ability to accumulate Ks faster than my opponents and in fewer innings. Randy Johnson has shown he has mastered the art of the strike out—have you?

GP in Cincinnati
Godfather@FantasyBaseballMafia.com