Thinking About Strikeout Rates

Until recently I was perfectly okay with using strikeouts per nine innings as a stat to evaluate pitchers. However, during a discussion with Ben Lindbergh he mentioned that K percentage was the standard at Baseball Prospectus. I didn’t see much of a difference between the two at first but as time went by and I thought about it more deeply I started to see some benefits in strikeout percentage. The main difference between the two statistics is that K/9 is based on a percentage of outs while K% is based on a percentage of plate appearances.

The Hardball Times