Willihammer

Aaron Hicks has struck out 22 times in his first 17 big league games. His K-rate currently sits at 31.4%, tied for 10th worst in baseball with jay Bruce. a career 23.7% k-rate batter.

According to Charlie Adams at Beyond the Boxscore (courtesy of Pizza Cutter at StatSpeak.net) k-rates stabilize after about 150 PAs. But instead of waiting 20 more games for Hicks to reach that benchmark, I'm going to instead look at contact rate and guesstimate what Hicks' true k-rate might be based off that. Because as it turns out, contact rates stabilize before k-rates - right around 70 PAs, in fact. And contact rates correlate well with strikeout rates (somewhere between -.81 and -.91).

Below are the current contact rates for Twins batters:

Name	PA	Contact%	SwStr%
Chris Parmelee	62	79.40%	7.80%
Brian Dozier	63	86.50%	5.50%
Josh Willingham	65	74.70%	8.80%
Trevor Plouffe	68	83.20%	6.90%
Ryan Doumit	68	73.30%	10.60%
Aaron Hicks	70	73.80%	9.30%
Justin Morneau	78	83.60%	8.20%
Joe Mauer	84	81.50%	6.50%

To get an idea of how these rates compare, I pulled the sample of qualified batters dating back to 2010 (min 1000 PAs). Next are the 10 hitters whose contact rates most closely match Hicks' current 73.8% contact rate, and their k-rates over that period:

Name	Contact%	K%
Tyler Colvin	73.20%	25.70%
B.J. Upton	73.40%	26.40%
Alfonso Soriano	73.50%	23.10%
Kelly Johnson	73.60%	25.20%
Jay Bruce	73.80%	24.40%
John Buck	73.90%	23.80%
Sean Rodriguez	73.90%	22.30%
Mark Trumbo	74.00%	23.90%
Nelson Cruz	74.20%	20.90%
Geovany Soto	74.30%	23.40%

Sure enough, there is our man Jay Bruce again.

So, is Hicks destined to strikeout in the 23-24% range for his career? I don't think so. Certainly Austin Jackson wouldn't think so. Guys do improve, but judging Hicks' early contact rates, I feel confident that we can pencil Hicks in for a 20%+ k-rate for the rest of 2013 at least. While still pretty lousy, that would technically be an improvement over Hicks' current k-rate of 31.4%.