Photo via Corbin Burnes - Instagram
Corbin Burnes pitching
Corbin Burnes
With just a little more than three weeks left to play in the MLB season Corbin Burnes is on the precipice of history.
Burnes’ 14 strikeouts against the Giants on Thursday brought him to 214 on the season, the most in the National League. He’ll have some work to do to hold down that top spot down the stretch: Giants starter Carlos Rodon is right on his heels at 212 and has struck out ten or more batters in four of his last five appearances. If Burnes can stay at the top of that leaderboard, however, he’ll be the first Brewer ever to lead his league in strikeouts.
In many ways Burnes is having a better season in 2022 than he did in 2021, when he won the National League Cy Young Award. Burnes has already made as many starts as he did last season and logged more innings while still maintaining an earned run average under 3.00 and, as noted above, striking out more opposing batters than any other pitcher in the league. His strikeout rate, however, has actually diminished a bit. He’s striking out 11.2 batters per nine innings in 2022, his lowest mark since his MLB debut season in 2018.
Burnes’ massive strikeout rate makes him difficult to put into historical context. In terms of raw numbers Burnes struck out more batters in 167 innings 2021 than any pitcher in Brewers’ franchise history besides Ben Sheets (264 in 237 innings in 2004) and Teddy Higuera (240 in 261 2/3 in 1987). Those raw numbers leave out a lot of context, however: Burnes is both used less often than many of the historical pitchers he’s compared to here and pitches in a more strikeout-friendly era.
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It’s impossible to know, of course, how good a pitcher like Ben Sheets or Teddy Higuera could have been in this baseball environment or what Burnes could have done with their workload. It is possible, however, to build in some context by comparing all of those pitchers to their peers.
FanGraphs has a statistic called K/9+ that measure’s a pitcher’s strikeout rate as compared to their respective league average. By that measure there have been 44 occasions in Brewers’ franchise history where a pitcher worked enough innings to qualify for his league’s ERA title and posted an above average strikeout rate (here a score of 100 is average). At present Burnes’ 2022 season ranks ninth among them at 131.
By that measure, here are the three highest scoring strikeout seasons in Brewers’ franchise history:
1. Ben Sheets, 2004, 149 K/9+
The 2004 season featured some of the most dominant individual pitching performances in recent history. Randy Johnson struck out 290 opposing batters and had a 2.60 ERA that season but didn’t even win the National League Cy Young, as voters preferred Astros starter Roger Clemens. Pirates starter Oliver Perez also had a historically notable season, becoming one of the first pitchers in National League history to strike out eleven batters per nine innings for an entire year.
For the most part, however, these performances were still outliers. As noted above, in Sheets’ best season the league average was just 6.7 strikeouts per nine, a far cry from today’s 9.0. As such, in context Sheets’ ten strikeouts per nine innings and 264 total stand out in stark contract against his peers.
2. Zack Greinke, 2011, 145 K/9+
It was an abbreviated campaign that isn’t often mentioned among the best in Brewers’history, but when he was able to pitch Zack Greinke was one of the best Brewers pitchers of any era at limiting balls in play. His season didn’t start until May, but Greinke still logged 171 2/3 regular season innings that season and struck out 10.5 batters per nine innings, the best rate of any season in his career.
As compared to 2004, by 2011 the league strikeout rates had started to climb a bit: They were up to 7.3 per nine in the National League that season, more than half a strikeout per game more than in Sheets’ season above. Greinke, nonetheless, still stood out significantly from his peers in this statistic.
3. Corbin Burnes, 2021, 141 K/9+
Like Greinke in 2011, Burnes was the best pitcher in his league by strikeout rate last season but had a limited opportunity to rack up big numbers: He made just 28 starts and needed to log innings on the season’s second-to-last day to qualify for the ERA title and this list.
Even adjusted for an inflated context, however, his rate stats were eye popping. Burnes struck out 12.6 batters per nine innings and 6.88 per walk, both the best rate of any pitcher in MLB. The former was 3.6 above the league average of 9.0.
The rest of the top ten:
4. Yovani Gallardo, 2009, 139 K/9+5. Teddy Higuera, 1988, 138 K/9+6. Teddy Higuera, 1987, 138 K/9+7. Chris Bosio, 1987, 133 K/9+8. Yovani Gallardo, 2010, 132 K/9+9. Corbin Burnes, 2022, 131 K/9+10. Teddy Higuera, 1986, 129 K/9+
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