{"id":15771,"date":"2019-05-06T15:25:43","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T19:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=15771"},"modified":"2019-05-06T15:25:43","modified_gmt":"2019-05-06T19:25:43","slug":"stephen-strasburg-now-halfway-to-3k-strikeouts-is-he-a-hall-of-famer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=15771","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Strasburg now halfway to 3K strikeouts … is he a hall of famer?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo via allansgraphics.com via free-extras.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Earlier this month, some breathless headlines pointed out that\u00a0Stephen Strasburg<\/strong> reached a surprising career milestone; he’s now eclipsed 1,500 career strikeouts<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Strasburg is the fastest to 1,500 career strike-outs by IPs than anyone in the history of the game.<\/p>\n

He’s likely to add at least 100 more punch-outs this season (his average is about 150 Ks\/season and is in his 10th pro season), but may add even more since we’re only about 1\/6th of the way through the season.\u00a0 So lets say he finishes the season with 1,650 strike outs.<\/p>\n

So it occurred to me … is Strasburg really halfway to becoming a hall of fame pitcher?<\/p>\n

We’ve generally in the history of the sport basically annointed anyone who hits that threshold a Hall of Famer.\u00a0 \u00a0Of the 17 pitchers who have hit 3,000 career punchouts<\/a>, 14 are in the Hall of Fame, one is\u00a0Roger Clemens<\/strong>, one is\u00a0Curt Schilling<\/strong> and one is newly minted 3,000 club member\u00a0CC Sabathia<\/strong> (another interesting test case for Cooperstown coming up in the next 5-6 years presumably … we’ll come back to him in a moment).<\/p>\n

But nothing about Strasburg’s career so far screams “Cooperstown.”\u00a0 He’s made a couple of all star games, finished 3rd in Cy Young voting in his best season, and for most of his career has not been the best pitcher on his own staff.\u00a0 \u00a0He’s been a very good pitcher, but injury prone with just one season out of his career 10 that didn’t feature at least a few weeks of D\/L time.\u00a0 He has one stellar season: 2017’s 6.4 bWAR season (also his peak Cy Young voting) but otherwise has a handful of 3-war seasons throughout his career.\u00a0 He’s nowhere close to Hall standards by JAWS or any of the baseball-reference.com metrics.<\/p>\n

Lets say for the sake of argument that Strasburg pitches another 9 seasons after this one, averages 150 K\/s a year and is sitting basically where Sabathia is this season: upper 30s, in his 19th pro season and right on the cusp of 3,000 strikeouts.\u00a0 Does that sound like a hall of fame resume to you?<\/p>\n

(yes i know this is a huge leap of faith; you can’t project pitchers, he may blow his arm out again, yadda, yadda.\u00a0 For sake of argument, assume Strasburg goes 10 more\u00a0 years, averages 14-11 with 150 Ks\/season).<\/p>\n

Coming back to Sabathia: he won a Cy Young, finished in the top 5 four years out of five (missing one\u00a0 year b\/c he got traded between leagues) and was absolutely one of the top pitchers in baseball during his peak JAWs period.\u00a0 He also will eclipse 250 wins (perhaps the new 300 wins of our era of the sport) and has had a nice late 30s rebound.\u00a0 Is Sabathia a Hall of Famer?\u00a0 \u00a0Strasburg doesn’t even have 100 wins yet at age 30 (but will pass it by the all star break this year), and seems unlikely to even get to 200 wins based on his average\/season.<\/p>\n

I wonder if Strasburg is really this generation’s version of\u00a0Kevin Brown<\/strong>, who was more remembered for his contract (he was baseball’s first 9-figure $100M deal<\/a>) than his production.\u00a0 Brown was a very good pitcher, but never won a Cy Young, never got to marquee career thresholds (300 wins, 3,000 strikeouts), but interestingly had a significant 5-year stretch in his late 20s\/early 30s that has him ranked 49th by JAWS<\/a>, ahead of 16 other Hall of Fame pitchers and perhaps leaving him as one of the most under-rated Cooperstown snubs of all time.\u00a0 Strasburg isn’t even this right now: he’s a good #2 starter who can’t stay healthy for more than a few months at a time.\u00a0 And I say this as a Strasburg defender.<\/p>\n

What do you think?\u00a0 Is the sport about to really start re-evaluating its pitcher career landmarks as the K rates skyrocket and the starter disappears.\u00a0 \u00a0And a guy like Strasburg has a chance to really demonstrate the issue if he can achieve some important career thresholds over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, some breathless headlines pointed out that\u00a0Stephen Strasburg reached a surprising career milestone; he’s now eclipsed 1,500 career strikeouts.\u00a0\u00a0Strasburg is the fastest to 1,500 career strike-outs by IPs than anyone in the history of the game. He’s likely to add at least 100 more punch-outs this season (his average is about 150 Ks\/season […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[47,638,723,637,38],"class_list":["post-15771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlbpitching","tag-cc-sabathia","tag-curt-schilling","tag-kevin-brown","tag-roger-clemens","tag-stephen-strasburg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15771"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15773,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15771\/revisions\/15773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}