Tuesday Trivia: 40 HRs with fewer strikeouts
 

Aaron Judge currently leads MLB with 51 HRs, but has 152 strikeouts to go along them. Similarly, Ohtani has 46 HRs and 145 strikeouts.

But 6 Major Leagues have hit 40 HRs or more in a season while having fewer strikeouts than HRs. Who are these 6 players, and which player did the feat the most times?

Johnny Mize and Joe DiMaggio

I'm going with Hank Aaron

Ted Kluszewski.

Hornsby

Gehrig

Pujols

Correct! Jonny Mize did it twice: 51 HRs to only 42 strikeouts in '47 and 40 HRs to 37 strikeouts the following year. Mize is the only player to do it with 50 HRs.

In '37 Joe DiMaggio led the League with 46 HRs (his only season getting to 40) and only 37 strikeouts.


Yes! Ted Kluszewski did in 3 years in a row from '53-'55 and is the only player to perform the feat 3 times.

Yes! Lou Gehrig did it twice when he hit 49 HRs in '34 and '36 to just 31 and 46 strikeouts respectively.

Hornsby is an excellent guess. He had 42 HRs and 50 strikeouts in '22 and 39 HRs and 39 strikeouts in '25.

Pujols is also a great guess. E.g. he had 46 HRs and 52 strikeouts in 2004.

2 more players on the list.

Barry Bonds?

I'd be a little surprised if Ted Williams isn't one of them.

I don't know if he hit 40 but Mel Ott?

Ted Williams only reached 40 HRs once, when he hit 43 HRs and struck out 48 times. Excellent guess though.

Correct! Barry Bonds hit 45 HRs and struck out 41 times as a 39 year old in 2004.

And 75 years earlier, Mel Ott hit 42 HRs and struck out 38 times as a 20 year old for the same franchise.

Well done everyone!

So what do we make of it? That today's players are only hitting this many HRs because they're going for broke?

Mel Ott has some crazy stat lines for a guy whose name rarely comes up among the All-Time Greats.

I used to think Jimmie Foxx's cards and memorabilia were crazy under-rated compared to other peers of his, but Mel Ott may be even more so.

Ott's not quite in Foxx's league, but he's not that far off.

Or the pitchers are throwing a lot faster and funkier over the past 10 years. And the hitters as a class haven't been able to keep pace on a relative basis.

Yeah, I think it probably says more about pitching than anything else.

Back in the day, many pitchers only had two pitches--fastball and a curve or some other off-speed pitch.

Now there are so many more options to think about from most pitchers, and fastballs tend to be faster. Pitchers are no longer pitching complete games on a regular basis. Instead, you have 4 pitchers or more per game, coming in fresh and exploiting hitters weaknesses (lefties vs. lefty hitters, etc).

Not sure what it means but I looked at the top 20 MLB home run leaders for 2024 and not one of them has led than twice as many K's as homers.

I think so , Somethings changed - Check out the top 50 most strikeouts in a season , they’re all from this century - EXCEPT for Bobby Bonds- who is on there twice .
https://www.baseball-reference.com/l...O_season.shtml
I must be getting old when I think of lots of strikeouts I think Rob Deer

I think according to analytics, strikeouts are no worse than any other out and are sometimes preferred because it's better to strikeout than to hit into a double play.

Well, just for fun, let's figure out the opposite:


Who had the highest strikeout to home run ratio?


Enjoy researching this one...the answer will have a very negative WAR!!


.

OK, Austin Jackson had 4 HR's and 170 Strikeouts in 2010 and I'm gonna stop right there.

Don't know if he's the guy you're looking for, as he still somehow had a 5.1 WAR, batted .293 and came in 2nd in Rookie of the Year voting that year.

I'm sure there's a bunch of slap hitters who had 0 or 1 HR's and however many strikeouts to have a much higher ratio than Jackson, but 170 K's to only 4 HR's is pretty impressive to me.

Gehrig hitting 49 with 31 strikeouts is insane .
Enjoyable quiz - here’s some of the notable 50+ HR low strikeout seasons ,
Maris 61 hr 67 so
1949 Kiner 54 hr 61 so
1955 Mays 51 hr 60 so
Ruth’s best 1921 59 hr 81 so
Bonds 73 hr 93 so
Honorable mention 2006 Pujols 49 hr 50 so

And here are some seasons where players had 30 HRs and fewer strikeouts:

DiMaggio 1938: 32/31
DiMaggio 1939: 30/20
DiMaggio 1941: 30/13
T. Williams 1941: 32/27
DiMaggio 1948: 39/30
Ken Williams 1922: 39/31
Berra 1952: 30/24
Willard Marshall 1947: 36/30
Musial 1948: 39/34
Kluszewski 1956: 35/31
Pafko 1950: 36/32

DiMaggio with 30 HRs and only 13 SOs in 1941 is pretty absurd.