Trevor Story hit home run number eight on Monday night as the Rockies defeated the Reds 5-1. The win puts Colorado into first place in the NL West. Story also struck out once to bring that season total to 23, which also leads the majors. Just for fun, his pace for the season works out to 99 home runs and 287 strikeouts.

As regular readers of the site know, there is a paradox involving strikeouts. High strikeout pitchers are great, but often so are high strikeout batters. The reason is that extremely high strikeout pitchers get big contracts, extremely high strikeout batters don’t last long in the majors. So when we see high strikeout batters, we see those that balance Ks with home runs. Given the history of the game, players who strikeout out around 200 times a season are on the edge of not continuing in the game. Those players need to produce a lot of power and draw some walks to make up for the hits lost to not putting the ball in play often. Right now Story is doing that. If the pitchers find a hole in his swing, so that the strikeouts keep accumulating and the home runs fall off, he’ll be back in the minors before the end of the year. Until then, I’m wondering how high both numbers can go for the rookie.