A History of 30% Strikeout Rates
Rookies are all the rage this year. Maybe that’s true most years, but it does seem especially true this year. We have seen the arrival of plenty of the game’s top prospects, and they have had wildly varying impacts on the game so far.
The most recent and most exciting prospect arrival is the Reds infield prospect Elly De La Cruz. He jumped out of the gate hot, hitting for the cycle and stealing a base in his first 10 plate appearances.
De La Cruz is insanely talented, one of these rare guys with a power-speed combination that has been rarely matched in MLB history. He’s pretty similar to Oneil Cruz in that regard, both are guys with foot speed near the top of the league and the ability to hit the ball above 118 miles per hour, a range where very few hitters have gone in the past.
The Topic
The big thing we know we’re going to get with De La Cruz (and Cruz) is a very high strikeout rate. That doesn’t mean they’ll always have high strikeout rates, but in the short term - we can be awful confident about that. I tend to think these guys will always have high strikeout rates just because of their height and how hard they swing the bat - but that’s not really the point here.
What I wanted to do is go through the history of strikeout rates above 30% to get some kind of feel for how tough it is to succeed in the Majors while doing that. There are plenty of inputs to consider, so I’ll try to do my best to be fair here.
The History
I went back to 2015 and looked for hitters with
→ 200+ PA
→ A 30%+ K%
That gives us 217 players, here they are with their OPS and K% shown:
The average OPS of the group is .716, below the current league average OPS of .727 - but not that far below.
There is a bit of selection bias here. If you are a 30%+ K% player without power, you are going to have trouble getting to 200 PAs as the team will be looking to replace you. The average Brl% of the group is 11.6%, much higher than the league average which has been around 7-8% over the last few years.
I’d say that what we want from a fantasy player, generally, is an OPS of .800 or better. Obviously, you can have an OPS much lower than that and still be a relevant fantasy player if you’re stealing bases, walking a bunch, scoring a bunch of runs, etc. - but I think an .800 mark is a decent mark to shoot for.
The Top Performers
Only 44 of the 217 (20%) hitters in this sample went above an .800 OPS. The top ten:
Aaron Judge 2017: 1.040
Joey Gallo 2019: .976
Shohei Ohtani 2021: .944
Giancarlo Stanton 2015: .939
Keston Hiura 2019: .936
Miguel Sano 2019: .923
Chris Davis 2015: .917
Aaron Judge 2018: .916
Miguel Sano 2015: .914
Aaron Judge 2019: .914
Now if I were bad at what I do, I could stop here and say that any hitter with a 30%+ K% has about a 20% chance to be a good fantasy player. That, of course, is a vast over-simplification, although I do think it’s fair to say that it’s “pretty tough” to be a great fantasy contributor with this kind of strikeout problem.
What we notice about the list above is that all of those guys just hit the ball extremely, extremely hard. With the possible exception of Keston Hiura, you absolutely would not want to get into any kind of physical altercation with any of those guys - they are all insanely huge, strong men.
What Do You Need
Exit Velo
So let’s go down that path. We are looking for general lessons here, but we are also pretty much specifically talking about the Elly De La Cruz player type, so let’s fit the data a bit more to what this guy can do.
If we take these 217 players and get rid of the ones with an average exit velocity under 90 miles per hour, we are left with 55 hitters, and the average OPS of the ground shoots up to .800 - with 26 (47%) meeting that OPS threshold of .800. Only 15 of those hitters came in under a .750 OPS, and 16 came in above .850.
So that’s a good sign, since we can be almost certain that Elly is going to average above 90mph on his balls in play (he averaged 93.4 in the minors this year).
Launch Angle
The other key stat about a ball in play is the angle at which it is hit. It always helps to hit the ball harder, but it means less when the ball is being hit on the ground.
The league average FB%, the way Statcast calculates it, is 26%. If we look at these 30%+ K% hitters with below-average fly ball rates, the average OPS jumps down to .681 - not good! If we add to that the 90+ mph exit velocity, it jumps up to .757, but still well below what we’re hoping for.
The Combination
So yes, unfortunately, I don’t have any ground to break with my conclusions here. The conclusion is that if you’re going to strike out above a 30% clip, you are also going to want to
Hit the ball very hard
Hit the ball in the air
I can at least give you a better idea about what the relationship between variables has been over the last several seasons with another scatter plot.
We want to see Elly De La Cruz, and others, show up here with a dark red dot. Most of the red dots show up above an 88-mile-per-hour exit velocity, and they seem to get redder as we go upward.
They also seem to get redder as we move to the right, and the darkest dots are all in the top-right quadrant (Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and a Joey Gallo season are the darkest red ones up there).
The more predictable stat here is exit velocity. That has mostly to do with swing speed, and swing speed doesn’t change much. Launch angle, and therefore fly ball rate, is pretty variable. The pitcher has a lot more control over that than they do over exit velocity - so this is where I’d say De La Cruz may struggle.
In the minors, he had just a 27% FB% in 2023. The good news is that, per FanGraphs, 2023 has been his lowest FB% season so far. I don’t have much doubt that a guy this skilled will eventually be able to lift the ball at a good rate, but it’s less certain that he can do that right away.
The Conclusion
Two conclusions!
The Elly De La Cruz conclusion
He certainly hits the ball hard enough to overcome a 30%+ K%, but there’s some reason to doubt that he can hit it in the air at a good enough rate to really push up above an .800 OPS.
I’m also not even really considering the possibility that he could be a 35%+ K% guy, which is absolutely possible. During this whole post, I pretty much assumed he’d be above 30% but not that far above it. If he goes for 35%, things get more difficult.
But for the sake of conclusions and fun, let’s assume that Elly looks like this in 2023:
→ 32% K%
→ 92mph EV
→ 30% FB%
That would make him very similar to these hitters:
2018 Aaron Judge (.916 OPS)
2018 Teoscar Hernandez (.771 OPS)
2021 Tyler O’Neill (.912 OPS)
Two out of three really good OPS marks, and with Elly’s steals ability he’d be a very good fantasy contributor even with an OPS closer to .750 than .900.
If the FB% stays below average, I’d say it’s more likely he stays below the .800 OPS mark and is more just “pretty good” than great.
The General Conclusion
If you’re thinking about owning a player that profiles for a high strikeout rate, you should be pretty confident that they can hit the ball hard and lift the ball at a good rate. If you see a guy with a 30%+ K% and an average exit velocity below 90 miles per hour, avoid! If you see a guy with a high strikeout rate and a reliably low FB%, avoid!
The scatter plots will stay up for awhile - so feel free to meander through the names there!