Jaffe: Analyzing Chris Sale’s 300-strikeout season
From SABR member Jay Jaffe at Sports Illustrated on September 21, 2017:
On Wednesday night, Red Sox ace Chris Sale made a bit of history, becoming the first American League pitcher to tally 300 strikeouts since the turn of the millennium, and just the fourth since the adoption of the designated hitter in 1973. While the 28-year-old southpaw’s case for the AL Cy Young isn’t as strong as it was a couple months ago, he’s joined some elite company.
At Camden Yards, Sale spun eight shutout innings against the Orioles, allowing just four hits without a walk and matching his season high of 13 strikeouts. The last of those came on his 111th and final pitch of the night, a slider that caught Ryan Flaherty looking. The whiff was his 300 for the season, making him the first AL pitcher to reach the mark since the Red Sox’s Pedro Martinez in 1999. Since then, the only pitchers to strike out 300 have hailed from the NL, where pitchers bat: the Diamondbacks’ Randy Johnson (four times, annually from 1999–2002) and Curt Schlling (2002) and the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw (2015).
As with other single-season milestones such as 20 wins and 250 innings, the disappearance of the 300-strikeout season owes plenty to the reduced workloads of starters via the industry-wide adoption of five-man rotations, increased reliance upon bullpens at the expense of complete games, and the use of pitch counts and (for younger pitchers) innings caps as a crude attempt to prevent injuries.
Read the full article here: https://www.si.com/mlb/2017/09/21/chris-sale-boston-red-sox-300-strikeouts
Originally published: September 22, 2017. Last Updated: September 22, 2017.