In his 20th game of the season Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees’ multi-talented right fielder, strained a muscle and took himself out of what in the last few years has become my favorite individual batting race of the season.
I’m referring to strikeouts. They fascinate me. I don’t understand how major league hitters can strike out so much. I don’t understand either how major league pitchers have so much trouble throwing strikes, but that’s a question for another day. Today I will deal with the frequency with which batters strike out.
In his first full season in the major leagues, 2017, the year he was voted American League rookie of the year, Judge led the majors with 208 strikeouts. He was in position to repeat last season until he was hit by a pitch and suffered a chip fracture of his right wrist, causing him to miss 45 games. At the time, he had struck out 137 times to 138 for Joey Gallo and 139 for Yoan Moncado.
This season Judge strained his left oblique April 20 and has missed the intervening month. The Yankees have not speculated on when he will be able to resume playing, rendering the ailment more serious than anyone would have initially thought.
Oblique injuries are relatively new. They might have happened in years past, but no one ever heard of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig suffering oblique injuries. That is not meant to question or belittle Judge’s ailment. No one in Ruth’s and Gehrig’s days knew what a glioblastoma was, but today we know it is a fatal brain tumor that has killed a dozen former major leaguers (Bobby Murcer and Gary Carter, for example) and others associated with Major League Baseball.
In baseball’s more ancient days, if a player pulled a muscle of any kind, he played in spite of it because he knew someone was waiting to take his place, and if he didn’t play, he would find himself out of a job. Today M.L.B., has the injured list, known until this season as the disabled list.
Teams are quick to put ailing players on the I.L. for two reasons: They quickly get a healthy replacement for the injured player, and the player, even if lightly injured, doesn’t risk aggravating the ailment.
In the case of the type of injury Judge has, teams are exceedingly cautious because pulled muscles are tricky. They more often than not take longer to heal than expected so better to be safe than sorry. Judge undoubtedly is eager to get back in the lineup, and by this time, the team’s trainers probably have to tie him down to keep him off the field.
In this instance, Judge has an additional reason to resume playing. When he strained his oblique, he was not leading the majors in strikeouts but, having struck out 26 times, was only 13th in the majors, according to Elias Sports Bureau. True, there was a lot of time for him to catch up to and even overtake the hitters ahead of him, but there was also the possibility that he was succeeding in reducing his strikeout frequency.
By the time he gets back in the lineup, Judge will in effect be starting the season over and will have to do what he did in his first 20 games to avoid striking out while still being productive offensively.
Meanwhile, the strikeout race will go on without him, and Gallo will be the favorite in the race.
Entering Saturday’s games, Gallo, in what should be his third full season with the Rangers, was tied for the lead with 60 strikeouts. With whom was he tied? None other than the $330 million man, Philadelphia’s Bryce Harper.
One of the things I like about the strikeout race is hitters can make up ground in a hurry. If a player lags in home runs, say, he isn’t likely to hit a bunch and catch up to the leader or leaders. Strikeouts, however, are so prevalent that a hitter can strike out two, three, four times in a game and in no time be among the leaders.
Gallo, for example, was eight strikeouts behind the leader, Jorge Soler of Kansas City, 53-45, after games of May 8, but only eight games later, before Saturday’s games, Gallo had struck out one more time than Soler and had pulled even with Harper. That leap wouldn’t happen with home runs or even runs batted in.
That Gallo should be in the same circle as Harper is particularly interesting. While Harper is in the first year of the most expensive contract ever given to a free agent, Gallo hasn’t even attained the right to take his contract to salary arbitration and has a meager $605,500 salary this season.
While Harper and Gallo were tied with 60 strikeouts each, Gallo led Harper in nearly every offensive category: 13 home runs to 7, 32 runs batted in to 27, .276 batting average to .222, .413 on-base percentage to .363, .657 slugging to .430, 1.070 on-base plus slugging to .793, 32 runs to 26. Gallo even led Harper in stolen bases, 3 to 1.
Earlier this month, Gallo became even more unique. He hit the 100th home run of his career at a time when he had only 93 career singles, becoming the first player in baseball history to hit 100 homers before hitting 100 singles.
Gallo, a left-hand hitting first baseman-outfielder, made his mark in excessive strikeouts as soon as he reached the majors and has maintained it since.
YEAR B.A. K AB
2015 .204 57 108
2016 .040 19 25
2017 .209 196 449
2018 .206 207 500
2019 .276 60 134
Once upon a time, hitters didn’t like to strike out. Some were even embarrassed if they struck out too much. Players, however, are living and playing in a different era. Statistics aren’t viewed the same way as they used to be. Conceding that point though not agreeing with it, I asked a younger colleague, Zach Kram of The Ringer, the following question:
In the new world (to me) of analytics and sabrmetrics, is it true that strikeouts don’t matter, that it’s better to take a more pronounced uppercut swing on the chance that you’ll make contact and hit a home run but miss than to swing to make sure you make contact? In other words, trade a strikeout for a chance to hit a home run.
“Strikeouts aren’t much worse than regular outs,” he replied. “Sure, with a runner on base, for instance, sometimes a ball in play will advance a runner that a strikeout won’t, but a ball in play also means the possibility of a double play, which a strikeout avoids, so the positives and negatives tend to cancel out. And with shifts and better defense, it’s less likely that balls in play will go for hits anyway. So instead, players try to hit for more power to avoid the shift, the tradeoff being that that kind of swing also yields more strikeouts. And pitchers know that batters are trying to hit for more power, so they want to avoid contact more than ever (because now, contact = a home run, which is obviously more damaging than a single), so then they try to get more strikeouts for themselves, and then it becomes a vicious cycle where both pitchers and batters have the incentive to go that way.”
Then, knowing how to pile on, Zach added of a statistical guru of whom I have no use, “Bill James put it a smart way once: ‘Strikeout pitchers are more effective than pitchers who don’t get strikeouts, therefore teams are always looking for pitchers who can get more strikeouts, and also looking to deploy those pitchers they have in such a way that they will get the most strikeouts. This effect would be offset by the tendency of teams to look for hitters who don’t strike out, if hitters who did not strike out were also better hitters. However, hitters who strike out are generally not less effective than hitters who do not strike out; hitters who strike out are generally just as effective as or more effective than hitters who don’t strike out. Thus, there is no pressure to find hitters who don’t strike out. This asymmetry pushes strikeout totals higher over time.”
The increase in strikeouts can be seen most vividly in this development: Until 2008 no player ever led the majors in strikeouts with 200 or more in a season. In the 11 seasons since then, the leaders has had 200 or more strikeouts 10 times, missing only in 2014 when Ryan Howard led with 190.
Mark Reynolds, playing for Arizona, was the groundbreaker, leading the majors for three successive seasons with 204, 223 and 211.
I do not subscribe to the idea that a strikeout is no worse than any other kind of out. A strikeout doesn’t drive in a runner from third or advance him to any base. The analytics crowd can create any scenario they want, but they haven’t sold me on their new-fangled theories, and I don’t think they will.
Could Aaron Judge and Joey Gallo be better hitters if they worked on making contact with the baseball more frequently? That’s an intriguing question for which there may never be an answer.