Study of strikeouts and grounded into double plays
Someone I know once wondered:I think that people tend to consider a large number of strikeouts as an example of lacking in plate discipline, which tends to suggest they are going to be more likely to swing at a bad pitch, and hit that GIDP more often.
I recalled guys like Rob Deer and Russell Branyan did not hit into many double plays while racking up many strikeouts so I decided to check into this.
While Baseball Reference's Progressive Leaders & Records for Grounded into Double Plays starts tracking in 1933, things look spotty until 1939. If I did things right that left 60,583 player seasons of data for 8,945 players left (through the 2007 season). I got rid of all players that had less than 1,000 plate appearances, which left 2,214 players to calculate K/PA, GIDP/PA, and K/GIDP for.
I then calculated correlation (r)
For strikeouts and GIDPs and came up with .7172. That was the wrong thing
to calculate because it was likely across all players, the more plate appearances likely meant more strikeouts or GIDPs, so I looked at rates (K/PA, GIDP/PA) instead and came up with -0.0026. Pretty much no correlation.
Some observations:
Branyan and Dave Nicholson are the only two players who had over 40 Ks per GIDP (45.73 and 44.07 respectively) with 1000+ PAs and they both struck out over 34% of the time (34.77% for Branyan and 34.50% for Nicholson).
They had less than 2000 PAs, Deer was 4th on the list (37.08 K/GIDP) and he had over 4500 PAs with a 31.23% strike out clip. Leaders for higher PAs were Vince Coleman with 5k+ PAs @ 21.33 (16.08% K clip), Darryl Strawberry with 6k+ @ 21.13 (21.37% K rate), Rick Monday with 7k+ @ 21.31 (21.13% K rate), Brady Anderson with 8k+ @ 18.31 (15.38% k rate), and Lou Brock with 10k+ @ 15.18 (15.40% k rate).
As for the lowest K/GIDP ratios, 3 players grounded into more double plays than they struck out with Ed Busch's 1000 PAs just qualifying his 0.88 ratio, Ernie Lombardi @ .98 (btw, this is for 1939 on as noted and Lombardi played in seasons before that so his totals are different here), and Zeke Bonura at .98. Lombardi had over 3000 PAs for 1939+.
Nellie Fox stuck out at the bottom of the list since he had 10k+ PAs and a 1.2343 GIDP/K ratio while striking out 2.09% of the time and grounding into double plays 1.69% of his PAs.
The guy that grounded into the highest % of double plays was Gene Green with 4.99% and he struck out 14.66% of the time. He is 1 of 5 to ground into double plays in more than 4% of his at bats. Those guys struck out between 4.33% (Lombardi) and 14.66% (Green). The others were Ron Coomer (13.25% K/PA), Danny Sheaffer (11.82% K/PA) and Allie Clark (6.32% K/PA).
2,214 players PA, K, GIDP, ratios data
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