K’s Are Up All over Baseball, but Not for Tribe Hitters

As anyone who’s ever listened to the “get off my lawn” ramblings of the old school television announcer could tell you, strike outs are up in baseball. Not only are they up in 2017 (currently on pace for a new MLB wide K/9 record), but they’ve been going up for a long time. For good or bad, it’s a simple fact made obvious by this graph.

Major League Baseball’s strike out rate is in solid blue while the Indians rate is underlying in red. As would be expected, the one with the bigger sample size is much more consistent and slow moving, but there is a constant trend in both. Ever since the early 1980’s, K’s have been rising and excluding the short period of pitcher dominance in the 1960’s, they’ve been rising essentially since they’ve been a stat.

At the same time, while the Indians hitters struck out more often than the league average for the entirety of 2005 through 2011, they’ve not only been below league average since 2014, but if anything have seen that rate drop, at this point almost nearing the levels in the 1990’s.

Looking at the All-Time leaderboards, this may not be apparent. Carlos Santana jumped into the Indians top ten in career K’s last year and Jason Kipnis has joined him this year. Lonnie Chisenhall, Michael Brantley and Yan Gomes also began the year in the top 50, but these cumulative stats can be deceiving as most of these players have been around since at least 2011. When we look exclusively at K%, things change greatly.

For reference, the chart above shows the Indians ten highest career strike out rates in franchise history among qualified hitters and it’s really obvious why the Indians were so far above league average in the early 2000’s. It also shows that strike outs on the individual level are not entirely effected by era as 1940’s outfielder Pat Seerey K’d with the best of them.

Focusing exclusively on the current era, it isn’t as if everyone has been immune from the increase, something that makes the team’s overall numbers even more impressive. Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn both made the above list (another place they will be linked forever in Tribe history) and there’s one active player on the list as well in Yan Gomes. In addition, Jason Kipnis isn’t too far behind at 17^th and Carlos Santana ranks 29^th in career K-rate.

It turns out that while essentially the entire line-up (beyond Gomes) is striking out at a lower rate than league average, the real reason for the Tribe’s great success in avoiding K’s belongs to two players on the current roster and from 2013 through 2015, a certain utility man. Those two players, unsurprisingly, are Michael Brantley and Jose Ramirez with Mike Aviles being the un”K”able utility man.

As Aviles is no longer on the team, the chart above focuses exclusively on Brantley and Ramirez. Despite one or the other not being on the team for a significant amount of time in each season (Ramirez added late in 2013 and spent much of 2014 and 2015 in AAA, Brantley missed almost all of 2016 with injury), they have had a significant effect on the team’s home run rate. Just as the team has consistently been around 20%, the pair of Brantley and Ramirez have combined to be about half of that. Despite making up just 15% of the Indians plate appearances since 2013, they’ve dropped the team K-rate by more than 1.5%.

More importantly than the past, however, is the present. This season, when baseball is looking to set a new high K%, the Indians are at their lowest team rate since 2012 and second lowest since 2005. As seen in the chart above, that isn’t just Brantley and Ramirez either as the entire team has a 19.7% rate beyond them. This is largely pushed by great rates for Francisco Lindor (13.5%) and Santana (14.3%), but even the king of K, Edwin Encarnacion, is only striking out slightly more than the league average. While this is also above his career rate, it’s more than 10% lower than Mike Napoli‘s K-rate this year and nearly 10% lower than his 2016 mark.

While down the line, the team has been greatly successful in this aspect (third in the Majors), they’ve done in different ways. Santana doesn’t swing at pitches outside the zone, to the point where he’s fifth in the AL, swinging at 21% of pitches out of the zone (he also has only swung at 40% of pitches in general, seventh least in the AL). Encarnacion isn’t much worse coming in 12th with 23%. Brantley and Ramirez don’t take as many pitches, but more importantly, make successful contact more often. They rank fourth and eighth on contact within the strike zone at 94.3% and 93.2% while Lindor comes in 12th (92.2%).

All four of Brantley, Ramirez, Lindor and Santana rank within the best 16 in the AL in least percent of swinging strikes, a combination of pitch selection and high contact rate. While there are some today who will completely throw out the strike out as an offensive negative, the fact remains that no matter the situation, putting the ball in the field is better than swinging and missing. There is an argument that it’s worth striking out if you can increase your power, but why not avoid striking out and hit for power if you can.

To this point, it appears the Indians are doing that. They rank fourth in slugging (and there’s a huge gap between three and four [Boston]) and fourth in OBP. While they don’t hit a ton of home runs, as a team they get more out of their doubles than most teams get out of their homers. With an offense centered around reaching base and hitting doubles (second in AL), avoiding the K is a very useful ability and the Indians are certainly good at it.