Strikeouts are both overrated and underrated for hitters.
On one hand, a hitter can be extremely productive even if he does strike out a lot. On the other hand, for fantasy baseball purposes, if a hitter struggles with contact, he’s almost certainly going have trouble hitting for average. It’s not the be-all-end all of fantasy value, but stockpile a few too many of those swing-and-miss guys and you’ll end up with a batting average “1” in Roto leagues.
The proof is in the numbers. I examined hitters who qualified for the batting title who struck out at least 24.0 percent of the time the last five years (courtesy of fangraphs.com). That encompasses 78 individual seasons from hitters. Of that group:
- One player of the 78 hit .300 or better. Dexter Fowler hit .300 exactly in 2012.
- Three players of the 78 hit .290 or better. Outside of Fowler, Marlon Byrd (‘13) and Austin Jackson (‘10) did it.
- Ten of the 78 hit .280 or better. The aforementioned players are joined by Chris Davis, Carlos Gomez and Starling Marte from ‘13; Josh Hamilton and Chris Johnson from ‘12; David Wright from ’11; and Brad Hawpe from ’10.
- Seventeen of the 78 hit .270 or better. Add in these names: Chris Davis and Corey Hart from ’12; Colby Rasmus, Ryan Howard and Justin Upton from ’10; and Ryan Howard again from ’09.
- Twenty-nine of the 78 managed a .260 clip or better.
- Finally, 39 -- or exactly half -- hit .250 or better.
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From that list we see a few things. First, it’s really hard to get to .300 and .290 with so many Ks, but it’s not much easier to hit .280 either. Heck, only 21.8 percent of the batters got to .270!
Second, while BABIP is somewhat influenced by a hitter’s skill, there were only two hitters who managed to repeat hitting above .270 with a K-rate this high: Ryan Howard and Chris Davis. Either a hitter dropped his K-rate a bit and hit for a higher average, or they were unable to sustain their high BABIP and the average dropped.
The bottom line here is that if a hitter strikes out nearly a quarter of the time he comes to the plate, he’s almost certainly not going to help you in batting average. In most Roto leagues, he will hurt you in the category as a negative -- the question is just by how much?
That isn’t to say you’re going to avoid Chris Davis because he’s not going to bat .300. It’s just that you’ll need to plan your subsequent picks accordingly. While you never want to chase batting average because it fluctuates a great deal due to BABIP, you’ll still want to avoid filling your squad with a bunch of high-strikeout hitters unless you are content to punt the category.