The Longest Streaks without a Strikeout to Start a Career, 1950-2011

Yesterday, I took a look at the players

 who had the longest streaks without a strikeout to start their careers in the 1919-1949 era. Today, I focus players in the time since 1950.

In the table below, “1st Gm” is the date of the players’ 1st major league plate appearance (not necessarily their debut), and “Last K-less Gm” is the date of the game before the strikeout-free streak was broken. The “Games” column provides links to the streaks in the players’ game logs. The table is sorted by the most PAs in the streak. I also included the number of walks drawn and the players’ teams.

Lute Barnes

didn’t strike out in his first 65 MLB plate appearances. (That’s good.) He then struck out in 5 of his next 16 plate appearances. (That’s bad.) But at least he set a post-1950 MLB record first! (That’s very good.) Oh, but he never played in MLB again. (That’s… actually, that’s more sad than anything else.)

Del Unser

had a 15-year career, but to me, the highlight came off the field , when he appeared in a 1981 episode of Family Feud with his Phillies teammates Mike Schmidt , Larry Bowa , Garry Maddox , and Dick Ruthven . The Phillies squared off against a team of 5 Kansas City Royals, including Willie Wilson , Paul Splittorff and Dan Quisenberry . I really wish that episode was available on YouTube.

After striking out just once in 85 PAs in his first year, Harvey Kuenn

won the Rookie of the Year Award the next season. He made the All-Star Team that year (1953) and each of the next 7 years. That was about it for productive seasons, but it’s a lot more prominence than most of the other players on this list ever achieved. In fact, he is almost certainly the best player on this list.

J.J. Hardy

likely won’t have a career as productive as Kuenn’s (though that’s possible), but he is the most interesting player on this list to me. This is because of his relatively high 14.6% strikeout rate. That’s somewhat low by modern standards (the 2011 MLB average was 18.6%) but it’s very, very high for someone with a 50+ PA strikeout-less streak. For reference, most of the other players on this list had strikeout rates in the 5 to 10% range. Using his career strikeout rate as a guideline, the chances that Hardy would have a 53-PA streak without a K to start his career are .02%, or about 4300 to 1. Yet somehow, Hardy has the longest such streak since 1972. Not bad, J.J.!

Hardy also drew 8 walks, which is tied for the second-most walks drawn before a player’s first career strikeout. That indicates he had a fair number of deep counts, which adds to his degree of difficulty. In fact, I went back and counted, and Hardy had 12 counts with two-strikes before the first one that ended in a strikeout. That includes at least two 0-2 counts.

Johnny Temple

made 4 All-Star Teams in his career, though in the final of those seasons, he finished with a negative Baseball-Reference WAR, so… perhaps he was a bit overrated. Still, he was probably the second- or third-best player on this list (Hardy and Chico Carrasquel are virtually tied with Temple, at least as far as career WAR is concerned).

Luis Cruz

has only 169 major league PAs to his credit so far, and none since 2010. He’s now in the Dodgers’ system.

The Ozzie Virgil

on this list is the father, not his more famous son with the same name. The elder Virgil never played regularly, but his son made 2 All Star Teams in the 1980s.

Casey Kotchman

has 289 career strikeouts in 2891 career PAs. That’s oh so close to a K rate of exactly 10%. You need to find a way to make this happen and then immediately retire, Casey.

Overall, combining this list with the one for 1919-1949, we can see that despite this list covering twice as many seasons, the lengths of the streaks are just not as long. In fact, the #1 streak on this list (Barnes’ 65-gamer) would rank at best in a tie for 6th if both lists were combined; at worst, Barnes’ streak would rank as only the 9th-best in history. Unser’s 63-game streak, 2nd on this list, ranks no better than a tie for 9th overall, and could possibly be as low as a tie for 12th. And those are the only two streaks in the modern era that could even be in the top 10 since 1919.

In short, it’s a lot harder to have a strikeout-free streak when both pitchers and batters are more prone to striking out.