We all know that strikeout rates are up all across baseball for the last few years but today we will look at Minnesota Twins batters and their strikeout rates going back to 1961. We used B-R’s amazing Play Index to find what we were looking for.
The top two all time Twins leader in strikeouts are Harmon Killebrew with 1,314 and Joe Mauer with 1,034. Mauer? What the heck? Longevity can do strange things to numbers and the devil is in the details.
Today we are going to look at Twins hitters that have struck out at least 400 times in their Twins career and it turns out that there are 32 of these players ranging from Bob Allison to Zoilo Versalles. We will be trying to show what percentage of the time that they players struck out based on their strikeout totals as compared to their plate appearances. If I use at bats instead of plate appearances the numbers get even worse.
So you think you know who is the Minnesota Twins all-time “whiff” King? You might be surprised.
In the American League over the same time period (using “777” as a minimum strikeouts), four players had a strikeout percentage of 30% or more. They are Chris Davis (32.47%), Bo Jackson (32.03%), Jack Cust (31.48%) and Rob Deer (30.69%).