Chris Archer, King of Strikeouts

Developer of mlbfarm.com and baseballsavant.com and great baseball mind Daren Willman reminded the baseball world on Twitter today that Chris Archer and his filthy slider are good. Really good.

As Chris Archer prepares to take the mound tonight, we can note that he is the proud owner of the most strikeouts by one single pitch in all of baseball this year, and he’s leaving the competition behind pretty quickly. Chris Sale’s 107 strikeouts on his fastball is a clear second place to Archer’s 140 slider Ks.

Getting to the top of this particular leader board requires both quantity and quality. The pitch has to be thrown a lot, it has to be thrown for strikes, and it has to get a lot of swings and misses.

According to Baseball Savant, Archer has thrown 1146 sliders this year, good for a career high 45% of his repertoire. That is over 300 more than Ervin Santana’s 840 sliders, second place on the quantity leader board.

For quality, Chris Archer has recorded 238 whiffs on the pitch this year, good for almost 21% of his sliders. That is, again, at the top of the leader board for most swinging strikes on a slider and leads Max Scherzer’s 192 swinging strikes by another wide margin. At this rate, Chris should be able to surpass his career high of 276 whiffs on the pitch set in 2015, and just barely missed in 2016 with 275.

So he’s got both quantity and quality on the pitch. Does he have the best slider in baseball? Does he have the best pitch in baseball?