A Cy Young Award winner might be the best pitcher in baseball, but the one who takes home the MLB strikeout crown is probably the nastiest.
These are the pitchers who could do it in 2024.
Here are five of the top candidates to lead the Major Leagues in strikeouts this season — and five dark horses — as picked by a panel of MLB.com experts.
There are favorites, and then there’s Spencer Strider and strikeouts. Given how consistently he has missed bats in his time as a big league starter, this was an easy No. 1 pick. In 2023, Strider became the first Braves pitcher to lead the Majors in strikeouts since John Smoltz in 1996. If he does it again, he would join Warren Spahn in 1950-52 and Tommy Bond in 1877-78 as the only Braves pitchers to do so in multiple years, let alone consecutive ones.
— Sarah Langs
2. Gerrit Cole, RHP, Yankees
2023 K’s: 222 (5th in MLB)
Cole finally won his first career Cy Young Award last year, but his 27% strikeout rate was also a six-year low. His four-seamer was the most valuable pitch in baseball, but it did lose 1.2 mph from its 97.8 mph average in 2022. And at age 33, Cole might soon enter the decline phase of his career. So why is he a favorite here? Because the two-time MLB strikeout king is still the game’s most reliable pitcher when it comes to racking up the K’s. Cole’s 1,418 strikeouts since the start of 2018 are 200 more than anyone else, and he has averaged 265 K’s over the last five full seasons.
— Brian Murphy
The Orioles got Burnes to be the ace who leads them to a division title repeat, and for good reason: Burnes is Baltimore’s best starter since Mike Mussina — and he’s more of a strikeout artist than Mussina was. Burnes is one of five pitchers with 200-plus K’s in each of the last three seasons, along with Cole, Aaron Nola, Kevin Gausman and Dylan Cease. And of that group, he and Cease are the only pitchers still in their 20s. Burnes has one league strikeout title (he led the NL with 243 in 2022), and he should be among the MLB leaders for a long time yet.
— David Adler
López put together a full-fledged breakout campaign in his first season with the Twins. He stayed healthy enough to make 32 starts for the second year in a row, and the results were phenomenal. López joined the sweeper revolution, and the pitch helped take his repertoire to another level — along with gaining roughly 1 mph or more across the board. He can now attack hitters with four different offerings — four-seamer, sweeper, changeup, curveball — that all had whiff rates above 28% and notched at least 39 strikeouts. Heading into his age-28 season, López is at the peak of his powers, and may have the combination of durability and stuff to nab his first K crown.
— Andrew Simon
With three straight seasons of over 200 strikeouts, Gausman has come into his own. His 669 K’s since the start of 2021 — including last year’s career-high 237 — rank third in MLB, behind only Cole (722) and Burnes (677). Gausman also has proven incredibly durable, with six seasons of 30-plus starts since 2016. All of that, along with a devastating splitter that has accounted for 393 K’s across the past three years — the most by any pitcher on any one pitch type in that span — makes the 33-year-old a strong candidate to rack up the most strikeouts in ’24.
— Jason Catania
What is a dark horse, exactly? Your mileage may vary, but for this exercise, we considered anyone who did not strike out 200-plus batters in any season from 2021-23. That ruled out a group of 29 pitchers.
Greene has a 30.7% strikeout rate in his career, and averaged 98.3 mph on his four-seamer last season. If he can remain healthy, a K rate like that gets him into the echelon of pitchers who rack up 200-plus strikeout seasons year after year. Since his MLB career began in 2022, Greene has 54 strikeouts at 100-plus mph, three times as many as any other starter in that span. In fact, that is one more 100 mph K than any other starter in the…
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