Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
August 12, 2008
Dunn K

Adam Dunn strikes out in his first plate appearance with the Diamondbacks. The broadcast showed a graphic that Arizona now has three of the top five batters with the most strikeouts in the National League.

While strikeouts for an individual batter don't matter that much, strikeouts for an offense probably do. It takes away opportunities to get hits because so many batters are striking out so often.


Posted by David Pinto at 09:12 PM | Players | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Strikeouts for an individual batter clearly affect contact rate, which in turn puts an upper cap on your batting average. In other words, as long as Dunn strikes out on a quarter of his plate appearances, he will be hard-pressed to maintain a reasonable average.

Since batting average is the primary driver for OPS, high-strikeout, low-contact hitters have to excel at drawing walks and crushing the ball when they do make contact in order to keep their OPS up.

Of course, that's Dunn to a T. It's the guys, like Brandon Wood, who strike out a ton and don't draw enough walks or hit the ball hard enough, who have problems and should consider changing their approach.

Posted by: Subrata Sircar at August 12, 2008 09:44 PM

Strikeouts, especially of the type that Dunn racks up - the kind where the batter is taking a lot of pitches waiting for one to crush - run up the pitch count.

Posted by: Steve H at August 12, 2008 10:21 PM
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