By mere technicality, Adam Dunn won't break the single-season strikeout record. He's missed 39 games this year, but it isn't because he's been hurt. Dunn has been so atrocious that he's been benched repeatedly, and is only playing now because Paul Konerko and Brent Lillibridge, the other two first basemen on the White Sox roster, are too hurt to play the position. Through 121 games, Dunn has amassed 174 strikeouts, a number well short of Mark Reynolds, who whiffed 223 times in 2009. But even with his embarrassing strikeout total, Reynolds' season was more than redeemable. He collected 44 home runs, 102 RBI and even hit .260, phenomenal numbers all things considered. Dunn, on the other hand, has no other stats to fall back on. His statline -- a .160 batting average, 11 home runs and 42 RBI -- is Rocky-Dennis-in-a-funhouse-mirror ugly.
Just how bad has Adam Dunn been, really?
Even without the strikeout record, Dunn’s season has been nothing short of a disaster. With 174 strikeouts in 412 at-bats, Dunn has a strikeout rate of 42.2%, which will break Reynolds’ 2010 total by a whopping 7% as the highest in history. He will join Mark Reynolds (2010) as the only hitters in history to have a higher strikeout total than his batting average, which is all the more impressive considering Reynolds batted 38 points better than Dunn. His overall batting average can officially be described as the worst ever, as it’s the lowest of any batter with at least 450 plate appearances. His hit rate against left-handed-pitchers is an ungodly .091, which reads more like a Texas speed limit than a batting average.
Then factor in that he's being paid $12 million this year, that he made the switch from the tougher-to-hit-in National League to a hitter's paradise in the American League, that he spent most of the year batting cleanup for the White Sox, that he did it as their designated hitter, and that his home run and RBI totals aren't even Top 5 on his own team, let alone in the league, and it's very possible that we've just witness the worst single-season hitting performance in baseball history. And what's spectacular is that it came from one of the best, stablest home run hitters in the game, a player who was coming off seven straight years of at least 38 home runs -- a feat done by only he, Babe Ruth and Rafael Palmeiro. He'll turn 32 years this November and has 365 home runs. He could easily finish his career with 500 home runs, assuming this monstrosity was only a blip on the radar.
