Home run hitters and strikeouts

Someone emailed me recently with the following question:

"I have heard it said that home run leaders tend also to be strikeout leaders. Looking over some stats, there are enough exceptions to this  statement to make me wonder if it is true.

Would you say that there is sufficient evidence to make such a generalization?"

 Here is my answer:

"The correlation between HR frequency and strikeout frequency was .59 for guys with at least 5000 plate  appearances from 1994-2013. So there is a general tendency to see more strikeouts as you hit more HRs, but it certainly is not a perfect relationship. I also did the correlation using HR/PA and SO/PA. The correlation was about the same, .57 (and PAs excluded IBBs)

Here are the top 20 guys in HR/AB (that is the first number) and the 2nd number is SO/AB. The average strikeout rate was .172 for all the players. 14 of these top 20 guys are above that (Frank Thomas was just barely above it). The average for the top 20 is .214. So there is a general tendency.

Player	HR	SO
Barry Bonds	0.094	0.152
Sammy Sosa	0.078	0.262
Jim Thome	0.075	0.306
Ryan Howard	0.072	0.323
Ken Griffey	0.071	0.195
Adam Dunn	0.068	0.344
Manny Ramirez	0.068	0.220
Albert Pujols	0.067	0.114
Alex Rodriguez	0.067	0.211
Rafael Palmeiro	0.066	0.142
Juan Gonzalez	0.066	0.185
Frank Thomas	0.066	0.172
Carlos Delgado	0.065	0.240
Jeff Bagwell	0.065	0.208
Mo Vaughn	0.064	0.269
Mike Piazza	0.062	0.161
Richie Sexson	0.062	0.266
Gary Sheffield	0.062	0.138
Larry Walker	0.061	0.168
David Ortiz	0.061	0.209