I was shocked when I saw this... Joe DiMaggio Career Home Runs: 361 CAREER Strike-Outs: 369 God damn, that is impressive!!
Yes, that is impressive. There were other players of that era (or just before or afterwards) that were also impressive in their combination of power and not striking out: Joe Dimaggio: 361 HRs, .579 slugging percentage, 369 Ks, 20.8 plate appearances per K Yogi Berra: 358 HRs, .482 SLG, 414 Ks, 20.2 PA/K Lou Gehrig: 493 HRs, .632 SLG, 790 Ks, 12.2 PA/K Johnny Mize: 359 HRs, .562 SLG, 524 Ks, 14.1 PA/K Stan Musial: 475 HRs, .559 SLG, 696 Ks, 18.3 PA/K Ted Williams: 521 HRs, .634 SLG, 709 Ks, 13.8 PA/K Berra struck out just as little as Joe D but didn't quite have the same power, Musial and Mize had the same power levels but struck out just a little more, while Williams and Gehrig struck out somewhat more but were much better hitters. Edit: Worthy of special notice are DiMaggio's 1937-1941, where he averaged 34 HRs and 24 Ks per year, and Ted Kluszewski's 1953-1956, where he averaged 43 HRs and 35 Ks per year. Big Klu looked like a sure bet for the Hall of Fame in 1956, but at the age of 31 that was his last decent year because of injuries.
It's an interesting stat but I question how valuable even looking at something like strikeouts is. For the most part the annual league leaders in avoiding strikeouts are light hitting players of dubious value, the Juan Pierre's and David Eckstein's of the league. A good example is the NL MVP race last year, you had Howard who struck out 180 times and Pujols who struck out 30. Just by virtue of Pujols putting the ball in play so many more times he was bound to have more GIDP's then Howard and he ended up with 13 more. There are plenty of situations where a strikeout is no more harmful to a teams scoring chances then any other kind of out. I wonder if those 13 "extra" outs could be worse for a team's chance of scoring runs then Howard's 150 more K's.
I think moving runners over and getting sac flies and such with 1 out, and the chance of a fielder making an error would definitely make a difference.
Strikeouts are the death knell of light-hitting players, so they'd better have low strikeout rates, or they're out of the show. Power hitters who don't strike out, on the other hand, are worth their weight in gold. I agree that strikeouts can be no worse than other outs sometimes (and even better with 1st and 3rd and 1 out compared to a DP), but I don't think your example makes the case at all. With a .365 batting average on balls put in play, Pujols gets 55 more hits than Howard by avoiding strikeouts (of which almost half would likely be extra-base hits), which I would certainly say more than makes up for 13 extra outs on double plays.
I wasn't really trying to make a case one way or the other mostly just thinking out loud. The reason I mentioned Pujols/Howard was because despite Pujols edging out Howard in the OPS department, RC and RC/27 give Howard the slight edge due to the DP difference. Maybe those stats just don't translate to the actual game so well since you're never going to have an entire lineup full of Howard's or Pujols'
also, did you know that Bill James calculated that DiMaggio lost more HRs due to his home park than any other player in history? So, in my opinion, that makes the 369 strike outs even more impressive.
Debatable as the negative impact of striking out may be, from a purely physical standpoint, that low of a K rate is pretty amazing. Crazy discipline and hand-eye coordination needed.
True, but what was his career SLG? If you try to hit for power, you are more likely to strike out. Then again, 4612 IS NINE years more AB's
Phil Rizutto claimed on the All-Century CD that if DiMaggio played in any other ballpark besides Yankee Stadium, he would have hit 700+ HR!
How does having warning track power in Yankee Stadium makes not striking out more impressive? Was the field of play smaller(distance between foul poles)? Because instead of a HR it's just a hit or an out which means he made contact anyway avoiding the K.
.512 The most amazing stat for Cobb is his RBI - HR. He drove in 1820 runs, without aide of a long ball. As compared to 1542 for Aaron, and 1503 for Ruth using the same criteria.
That's only one of many ridiculous things that the Scooter has said. Here are Joe D's splits: Home: .315/.391/.546 148 HR Road: .333/.421/.606 213 HR Clearly Yankee Stadium hurt him, but I can't see any argument that it cost him more than roughly 100 HRs in his career (the typical home/road split for HRs is about 10% more at home). Joe DiMaggio wouldn't have hit 700+ HRs playing somewhere else unless he had played at least 6 or 7 more years than he did (he missed 3 because of WW II, but if you put those back in and move him out of Yankee Stadium, you still only get about 550 lifetime HRs).
I would say that record belongs to Willie Mays in Candlestick park where it has been said he had at least 20 a year kept in by the wind.
There's times when anything but a strikeout will do, also. Like runner on 3rd and less than two out, a strikeout, popup or liner right at someone are about the only things you can't have.
Well, what people say and what is actually true are two different things. From 1958 through 1966, the prime of Willie's career, he averaged 39.4 HRs per year. Is it really reasonable to think that he would have averaged close to 60 home runs per year playing somewhere else? That seems pretty unlikely to me. In fact, it's even more extreme than that - Candlestick only opened in 1961, and from 1961-1966, Willie averaged almost 44 HRs per season. IMO there's no chance that he would have averaged 65 HRs per season playing elsewhere. People have said things like this about Candlestick for a long time, but the numbers really don't back it up, even if you only look at righthanded power hitters (the wind supposedly didn't hurt lefthanded hitters like McCovey as much). Orlando Cepeda hit slightly more HRs at home than on the road when he played for the Giants at Candlestick, just like Mays; so did Dave Kingman. Two people who don't get mentioned enough for having their home parks hurt their HR totals are Ted Williams and Eddie Mathews. Fenway Park was (and still is) a tough HR park for lefthanded hitters - when he played for the Red Sox Babe Ruth hit more than 3/4 of his HRs on the road, and David Ortiz has hit 58% of his HRs on the road since he joined the team - and that probably cost Williams at least 50 HRs in his career. Milwaukee County Stadium had 10' high fences, and playing there probably cost Mathews at least 70 HRs. Williams and Mathews have the two worst home-to-road HR ratios for players in the top 20 career HR list, although DiMaggio's is considerably worse. It's well-known that the top HR hitter who benefited the most from his home field was Mel Ott, who hit 63% of his HRs at the Polo Grounds. Others who benefited greatly include Ernie Banks, Jimmie Foxx, and Frank Robinson.
