Max Scherzer and the future of the 20-strikeout ceiling

Think for a moment about how absurd 20 strikeouts in a game is. Even in the era of swing fast, die young, and leave a good looking at-bat, even against an American League team without its DH, it’s a nonsensical total. Max Scherzer faced a stream of people who are the best in the world at their job. Imagine the concentrated skill that would be in one room if you could collect the world’s greatest 300 writers, musicians, teachers, or architects. Major League Baseball is something like that hypothetical scenario, with every hitter being at least close to one of the 300 best in the world at hitting baseballs.

Twenty of the 33 batters Scherzer faced on Wednesday night couldn’t hit baseballs. They tried. Valiantly. His fastball was just too quick. His breaking balls too deceptive. Here, look for yourself:

That’s a pitcher drifting through an astral plane and waking up at the end of the game and wondering what happened. It was just the fifth time in baseball history that a pitcher struck out 20 in a nine-inning game.

And, of course, all of those came within the last 30 years. Four of them came in the last 20 years. Strikeouts are going up. Fastballs are getting faster, but the human nervous system might be reaching its limit when it comes to reacting to baseballs from 60 feet, 6 inches away.

It seems reasonable to expect that the 20-strikeout ceiling is doomed. Even though 15 seasons passed between Randy Johnson and Max Scherzer, the era of strikeouts is going to stretch into the epoch of strikeouts, with no end in sight. Someone will break the 20-strikeout record. Scherzer was a James McCann whiff away, and someone will climb that summit.

Right?

I don’t know! That means it’s time for a good ol’ point/counterpoint, in which I argue with myself to present the illusion of thoughtfulness instead of admitting that I’m too cowardly to take a stand. It’s one of my favorite rhetorical tricks, and none of you will ever figure it out.

It seems pretty obvious. Here’s a graph that details how strikeouts have increased over the last 30 years:

If you look carefully at the Y-axis, you can see that the trend is straight up. Forget about 20-strikeout games. How about 15-strikeout games?

Surprisingly, the trend isn’t straight up like a drunk man on a jetpack.

Even with three-plus seasons left in this decade, it seems safe to say that the hyper-strikeout game is plateauing, even as strikeouts are increasing.

There’s a good reason for that spike in the 90s, though.

Randy Johnson had 20 games with 15 strikeouts or more from 1990 through 1999. The rest of baseball had 28. He also had nine of the 15-strikeout games in the 2000s. He was, simply, a super freak. He boosted the numbers by himself.

He wasn’t the only super freak in history, either. Of the 15-strikeout games in the 70s, Nolan Ryan had 15, Tom Seaver had four, and the rest of baseball had 16 combined. There’s always the chance of someone coming along to be exponentially better than their peers at striking batters out.

There have been 18 different pitchers to strikeout 15 or more in a nine-inning game since 2010. That’s out of 23 possible games. The hyper-strikeout game is more democratic now, and we’re just waiting for the super freak. It might be Chris Sale or Clayton Kershaw. This is Max Scherzer’s fourth time on the 15-K train, so he might have one more record-setting game in him.

It’s more likely that we haven’t met the Nolan Ryan or Randy Johnson of the next generation, though. Not necessarily the best pitcher, but the one who just can’t be touched. Mix that pitcher in with the high-strikeout era, and blammo. It’s inevitable.

I don’t even see why we’re arguing about this.

Over at The Upshot, there was an explanation of why surprises like Donald Trump and Leicester City blow everyone away.

The biggest (explanation) is recency bias, a concept most often evoked in financial markets by people who study the intersection of psychology and finance. We tend to overweight recent history in thinking about the likelihood that something might happen. People who have experienced a recent stock market crash are more likely to think another one is imminent, for example.

Strikeouts are going up because they’re going up. They’ve been going up for years, and they haven’t come down, ergo ...

Except what if the game changes? We’ve already seen the game move away from power, only to start zagging back. The prevalence of the defensive shift is unmistakable, but what if the next wave is the Wee Willie Keeler-type player, tiny ninjas who can beat the shift with an artisanal flair?

What if the rules change? What if baseball is tired of strikeouts, like my old colleague, Rob Neyer? What if baseball figures out the secret to preventing arm injuries is to make sure kids don’t spend their entire youths ramping up their velocity? What if ...

There is an upper limit to how hard a human being can whip a baseball. I’m not sure if we’ve defined the same kind of upper limit for hand-eye coordination and reaction time, especially if baseball moves away from a homer-as-best-result philosophy of hitting. If we enter an era of baseball where more starting pitchers throw like Aroldis Chapman than throw like Kenta Maeda, there will be an adjustment on the offensive side, too.

That adjustment might make it as hard to get to 21 strikeouts in a nine-inning game as it was in the 40s. Which is to say, nearly impossible.

Human beings are bad at predicting the future, especially when it comes to baseball, so the lesson here is that we can’t take Scherzer’s outing for granted. It isn’t just “oh, it’s gonna keep happening because strikeouts keep going up.” It’s more special than that, a mix of the right arm with the right stuff in the right game at the right time, just as it was the four times before him.

Will anyone get to 21? Seems likely with the increase in strikeouts, but don’t underestimate how unlikely it is even for someone like Scherzer to do it today, and don’t underestimate baseball’s capacity for change. This article might look awfully cute in 20 years, when a generation of super Ben Reveres have inherited the Earth.