I've struck out with 1,000 different women, but I digress.

I’m dusting off a Primey for that one.

I wonder if Walter Johnson even faced 1,000 different batters in his career.

He's at 32 strikeouts in 9 starts this year. At that pace it will take another 25 starts to break 3000. I think he ends the season just short.

Kershaw is 44 K behind Greinke but is striking out many more batters per inning (10.6 K/9 vs 6.2 K/9). At those rates in 99 more innings Kershaw should nudge slightly ahead (assuming both pitch the same innings). Very likely Kershaw is ahead of Greinke on the strikeout leaderboard at the end of this season.

Nobody else is really close to 3000Ks. Aaron Nola might have the best odds to be the next to reach that milestone (besides Kershaw and Greinke).

#5 - I'd bet on Cole over Nola easily.

Also Sale and deGrom if they can stay healthy, but...yeaaaah.

So I noodled around about Johnson facing less than 1,000 batters. BRef has data back to 1914 and that data is incomplete. Johnson started in 1907. The number of uniques in the 1914 - 1927 cohort was 344 but I don’t know how incomplete the data is.

Looking at it another way, if he faced 25 * 7 batters his first year, and rosters turned over at a 25% rate, that would be only ~45 new batters per year. 45*20 would be 900 “new” batters he faced in years 2-21, plus the original 175. Players didn’t change leagues very frequently back then.

In his last pretty big year* (1924), 277.2 innings, he faced 122 unique batters, at least according to BRef data.
(In 18 PAs, Babe Ruth slashed a .583/.722/1.167 against him.)

So maybe < 1,000 batters isn’t such a stretch.

*Average year for WJ, career year for mere mortals.

I'd bet on Cole over Nola easily.

This whole cohort is going to be hurt by losing 100 games during their prime.

Greinke is already > 3000 Ks if you include postseason games.

Retrosheet box score event files could be used to "identify" batters Walter Johnson faced in games/seasons for which play-by-play is unavailable. Since it is only box score detail, you'd probably have to assume that Johnson faced each opposing batter in the game (of course, that would be an upper bound). A coarser approach would be to simply compile a list of all opposing players in the league during Johnson's career.

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I feel like somebody in one of the SABR journals did a Walter vs every hitter type study. I know someone did it for Ty Cobb.