I created the GDP-K#. It is like the Bill James PowerSpeed#. It is the harmonic mean of a player's relative strikeouts (his Ks divided by league average) and relative GDP rate (his GDP rate divided by the ML average).
2*(K*GDP)/(K + GDP)
Bot K and GDP are rates in the above formula. The idea is to have balance and not be extreme in any one number.
So far I have looked at switch hitters with 5000+ PAs since 1939 (100 guys). Lower is better and Jim Gilliam is lowest at 51.9 (his relative K rate was 42 and his relative GDP rate was 67.6). So he struck out only 42% as often as the average NL hitter and grounded into DPs only 67.6% as often as the average MLB hitter. My data sources are the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia and Baseball Reference.
2nd lowest was 56.1 and then it only rises slowly. Gilliam is way ahead of the pack. An outlier in terms of being able to avoid both Ks and GDPs. Of the 100 batters here, Gilliam had the 4th lowest relative strikeout rate and the 11th lowest relative GDP rate. A batter might have a low GDP rate if he strikes out alot. But it seems like Gilliam was not one of those players. Either his speed or not hitting grounders in DP situations (or a little of both) account for his low GDP rate.
|
Player |
K RATE |
GDP Rate |
GDP-K# |
|
Jim Gilliam |
42 |
67.6 |
51.8 |
|
Red Schoendienst |
38 |
107.4 |
56.1 |
|
Ozzie Smith |
41 |
90.7 |
56.5 |
|
Gregg Jefferies |
38 |
123.8 |
58.2 |
|
Don Buford |
85 |
44.8 |
58.6 |
|
Harold Reynolds |
52 |
68.9 |
59.3 |
|
Larry Bowa |
46 |
90.7 |
61.1 |
|
Johnny Ray |
42 |
113.0 |
61.2 |
|
Jose Reyes |
60 |
67.6 |
63.6 |
|
Alfredo Griffin |
63 |
66.7 |
64.8 |
Update Dec. 27: Only 19.5% of Gilliam's career PAs were vs. LHP. So he did not bat right-handed that much, which helps him. During his career, I found that 27.6% of all MLB PAs were against LHP (I used the Stathead split finder for that).
I also found his GDP rate vs. both RHP and LHP. Then I used the MLB percentages for facing RHP and LHP to get a weighted average of what his overall GDP rate would be. That was 8.03%, a little higher than his actual 7.3% (I used Event Finder to get his GDP rates against RHP and LHP). When I recalculated his GDP-K# it was 53.68.
Red Schoendienst had 31.6% of his PAs vs. LHP while from 1945-58 all of MLB had 25.57% (I did not use his last 6 years since he only had 541 PAs out of his career total of 9,224). His weighted average turned out to be 10.05%, less than his actual 11.6%). His recalculated GDP-K# was 53.97.
So Gilliam is still ahead of Schoendienst, but not by a very large margin anymore.
Ozzie Smith had 33.3% of his PAs vs. LHP while it was 30.57% for all of MLB during his career. I don't think his GDP-K# would change much if we used the MLB percentages for facing RHP and LHP.
