  STAR has measured a variety of strange particle species in p + p collisions
at $\sqrt{s}$ = 200 GeV. These high statistics data are ideal for comparing to
existing leading- and next-to-leading order perturbative QCD (pQCD) models.
Next-to-leading (NLO) models have been successful in describing inclusive
hadron production using parameterized fragmentation functions (FF) for quarks
and gluons. However, in order to describe identied strange particle spectra at
NLO, knowledge of flavor separated FF is essential. Such FF have recently been
parameterized using data by the OPAL experiment and allow for the first time to
perform NLO calculation for strange baryons. In fact, comparing the STAR Lambda
data with these calculations allow to put a constraint on the gluon
fragmentation function. We show that the Leading-order (LO) event generator
PYTHIA has to be tuned significantly to reproduce the STAR identified strange
particle data. In particular, it fails to describe the observed enhancement of
baryon-to-meson ratio at intermediate pT (2-6 GeV/c). In heavy-ion (HI)
collisions this observable has been extensively compared with models and shows
a strong dependency on collision centrality or parton density. In the HI
context the observed enhancement has been explained by recent approaches in
terms of parton coalescense and recombination models.
