Rating Hitters By Their Home Runs As A Percentage of Their Strikeouts, aka The "Splinter Score"

Derrick Gold and Joe Strauss recently came up with a stat they call the "splinter score." It is HRs divided by strikeouts. But neither HRs or K's are adjuted for era or the league average. See Bird Land 10@10: Pujols, Musial & the Splendid Splinter Scale. (hat tip: Baseball Think Factory)

Just about a year ago I posted an entry called Which Players Had The Best HR-To-Strikeout Ratios? Here is that post.

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I looked at every player with 5000+ PAs since 1920. I found their relative HRs and their relative strikeouts. Then found the ratio of the two. Ken Williams, for example, hit 3.70 times as many HRs as the average player of his time and league while striking out only 75% as often as the average player. Since his ratio of ratios (3.7/.75 = 4.93) is the highest of anyone in the study, he is ranked first. The data comes from the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia. The table below shows the top 25:



DiMaggio hit only 41% of his HRs at home in his career while Williams hit 72%. So it is likely the case that DiMaggio would rank first, and probably by a wide margin, if HRs were park adjusted. Ted Williams hit less than 50% of his HRs at home.

The next table shows which players had the lowest relative strikeout rates among guys who hit 40+ HRs. Again, no pikers here. In 2004, Bonds had only 41 strikeouts while the average player would have had 100. I am so proud to see the demonstration of Polish power with 3 for Ted Kluszewski and 1 for Carl Yastrzemski (whose 1970 season ranks 27th). Don't forget Stan Musial is 13th on the above list.