Frank spoke with me this morning, and brought up Joe DiMaggio's home run per strikeout rate, which I had completely overlooked while putting together the information to support my assertion that DiMaggio was in fact the greatest offensive center fielder in the modern baseball era. While Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak is, in my opinion, the single greatest individual accomplishment in the history of American sports, his career home run to strikeout ratio is one of the most overlooked career accomplishments, certainly in baseball. DiMaggio's career numbers suffer from three full seasons lost to military service. But while he did play, he was a superstar, an elite hitter on par with Gehrig and Babe Ruth before him. And while Ruth and Gehrig both had an outstanding home run per strikeout rate, nobody in the game's history has combined power discipline at the plate quite as well as DiMaggio.
There have been 91 hitters in Major League history to amass 350 or more home runs during their playing careers. I had Baseball Reference generate a list of those players, which I imported into Excel. I then sorted the players to show who had the best Home run per strikeout rate in Major League History among power hitters. Joltin' Joe was at the very top of the list. He hit 361 home runs while only striking out 369 times. I feel very safe in saying that I don't ever see this mark by DiMaggio ever being bested.
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Building these sets: T206, 1953 Bowman Color, 1975 Topps.
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Last edited by the 'stache; 07-10-2014 at 12:34 PM.
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