Introducing a New Statistic for Strikeouts and Walks

I’m going to level with you. My role on this site is to write Cardinals analysis. It says so right there on the header. To the extent that I have a specialty, it’s statistical analysis. The point is, I spend a lot of time thinking about baseball as numbers. I have a confession to make though. Until recently, I didn’t really have a good way to think about strikeout and walk percentages. I’m not saying I didn’t have ANY way- I understand that striking out a lot is bad and that walking a lot is good. What I didn’t have, though, was any quantitative idea of the tradeoff between walks and strikeouts. How many articles about plate discipline have you seen recently? How about articles about someone who has started striking out a lot? Walking more? They’re very popular. The thing is, though, I read those articles and don’t actually know what’s good. I don’t know how to compare the two rates.

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