As Mike Piazza passed Carlton Fisk in the farcical catcher home run "record", another much more important milestone was passed and is somehow being marginalized by the Piazza story and Spidey-Gate. The other milestone was Roger Clemens passing lefty Carlton for second all-time on the all-time strikeout list. I know that it's just second, but at least it's a real record.

Clemens is over 1500 K's behind Nolan Ryan for first place so he appears to have achieved his ultimate position on the list. For the record here it is:

You might notice a few things about that list. For one thing, there are a number of recent pitchers. Critics charge that home run numbers in baseball have gone through the roof. They forgot, however, how many more strikeouts have been introduced by the recent style of play. One other thing is that there are a large number of pitchers, including Clemens and all-time K record holder Nolan Ryan, that pitched a ridiculous long time. That's not a knock on those two who will be remembered as great strikeout pitchers. However, when you see names like Greg Maddux and Frank Tanana, who will be remembered more for finesse than power (besides early in Tanana's career), you start to think that there's a better way to present the all-time power pitchers.

It got me to thinking about a way to compensate for era and career length. What I did was take for a given pitcher in a given year the strikeout-to-innings ratio for the league in which he pitched. Then I multiplied the pitcher's innings pitched by this ratio to get the expected number of strikeouts for the pitcher. I subtracted the expected strikeouts from the actual and recorded the difference. Then I summed that difference over a pitcher's career. Now, here are the top 50 for career strikeouts above expected through 2003 (Sorry, the Lahman database isn't updated dynamically):

That eliminates the era issue. There are a good deal more old-time players on this list. It's interesting to see Toad Ramsey ending up #19. And it's great to see J.R. Richard up there, too.

So Ryan is still number one but Randy Johnson blows past Clemens for #2. And guys like Walter Johnson, Rube Waddell, and Bob Feller climb up the list.

By the same token, this method provides us with a list of the worst strikeout artists of all time, the ones that fell shy of expectations by the most Ks. Here they are:

There are some famously soft tossers on the list, Bob Teksbury for one and Kirk Rueter among the current players.

However, there is still the issue of career length to deal with. If we just add up the figures over the years, pitchers with longer careers get buoyed. So my next idea was to use a ratio of actual strikeouts to expected. This would indicate which pitchers exceeded expectations the most. (I set a minimum cutoff to 500 IP, otherwise OF Mike Anderson would rank among the all-time leaders.) Here are the results for the highest ratio:

Now here are the lowest:

Poor Ted Wingfield. By the way, if you're interested the most average strikeout pitcher all time, the only that best fit the expected strikeout value, was Rich Gale with a ratio of 1.0001 (518 actual, 517.95 expected).

I'll tell you I like both sets of tables, but I'm not pleased with the last set entirely. Either one, however, is preferable to the all-time K list.