Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Double-digit K’s in a MLB debut
Posted by Chris JaffeTonight, Stephen Strasburg is doing one heckuva job living up to the hype. In his first six innings, he's fanned 11 with no walks, and only four hits allowed. (Naturally, pitching for Washington, he's down 2-1).
Brings up a question, though: what's the most Ks a pitcher has ever had in his MLB debut? Using Baseball-Reference's Play Index we can get an answer. (Not a perfect one, as the PI doesn't contain gamelogs for all baseball history, but it has it for a large majority of games since 1920. Based on that here are the most Ks any pitcher has ever had in his debut.
Strasburg is the 12th to have at least 11 Ks in his debut. He's only thrown 81 pitches so far, too. Let's see if he can tie (or pass!) J. R. Richard and Karl Spooner for the record at 15.
(I guess I couldn't waited until the game was over for this, but I'm going to be busier in a little bit, and this struck me at the moment).
Update: He finished with 14 strikeouts through seven innings, fanning the side in each of his final three innings.
History instructor by day, statnerd by night, Chris Jaffe leads one of the most exciting double lives imaginable; with the exception of every other double life possible to imagine. Despite his lack of comic-book-hero-worthiness, Chris enjoys farting around with this stuff. His new book, Evaluating Baseball's Managers is available for order. Chris welcomes responses to his articles via e-mail.
And just like that - it’s already a bit out of date as the Nats have the lead.
More importantly, he just struck out the side: 14 K’s puts him behind only Spooner & Richard.
Not bad. Not bad at all.