Fantasy Baseball: Top 20 Pitchers Based on K/100 Pitches

During my lunch break on Tuesday, I was scanning the baseball sites I frequent, including one I haven't visited in quite awhile-www.thebaseballanalyst.com. The Baseball Analysts is run by Rich Lederer, and his Tuesday post on ranking pitchers based on strikeouts per 100 pitches interested me. He has been following this metric for a few years now, so I decided to take a look myself. You can take a look at his article here.

Here are the Top 20 starting pitchers based on strikeouts per 100 pitches (I used a cutoff of 150 innings pitched so guys like Stephen Strasburg and Brandon Morrow are not included):

Here is a quote from his article:

As detailed in Strikeout Proficiency (Part Two), K/P has the highest correlation in each of the five run measures (ERA, R/G, ERC, FIP, and DIPS). K/BF has the second-highest correlation and K/IP has the lowest correlation. In any other words, K/P > K/BF > K/IP.

So, Lederer feels that his K/P is a better metric to rank starting pitchers than K/9 or K/IP. To calculate K/P, I used the following formula:

                               (K/Pitches thrown) * 100

I plan to take a look at this metric again at the end of the season providing year to date data along with second half data. It is not a surprise to see many of the top pitchers in baseball in the table above. I hope the second half data can provide some sleepers for 2011 fantasy drafts.