Yesterday (when I wrote Dunn), Adam Dunn said his slump was due to a mechanical problem with his swing:

“It’s boring,” Dunn said before the Chicago White Sox faced Cleveland. “It’s two little mechanical things. It’s technical.

“I can feel it, what it is. I’m just trying to figure out a way to stop it, and that’s the thing. I don’t want it to obviously snowball, and one thing leads to another and then you have 13 things to worry about. It’s not a huge issue, but it is to me.’

Dunn went 0 for 4 Monday night with a strikeout, but at least he got the bat on the ball three times.

The strikeout paradox interests me because research shows that strikeouts are a positive attribute for both pitchers and batters. For pitchers, more outs on strikeouts means fewer balls in play that can turn into hits. For batters, a high strikeout rate is usually associated with power hitters, so the strikeout weakness can be covered by the home run strength. The real source of the paradox, I believe, is the selection of which hitters get to strike out a ton. In other words, we don’t see the extreme strikeout artists on the batting side, simply because they are not good enough to stick in the majors.

You can see this in the shorter careers of high strikeout players. This study looked at players whose careers started no earlier than 1961 (162 game seasons) and ended no later than 2010 (no active players). They were grouped by their strikeout rate per plate appearance (PA), rounded to the nearest 0.1. The players were also required to have at least 50 PA in their career, and to have averaged at least 3 PA per game, meaning they were given a chance to start in a few games.

As you can see, the more batters strike out, the shorter their careers. To put it simply, strikeouts are a negative for batters, it’s just the major league hitters we see inhabit the space where that weakness can be countered. We should expect, then, that when a hitter’s K rate rises into the 30% range, his playing days are numbered.

I did take a look at the five players with a near 0 K rate. Two of them were named Felix, Felix Millan and Felix Fermin. Along with Glenn Beckert, they make up the type of hitters you might expect from this category, weak hitting middle infielders. They put the bat on the ball enough, however, to stick in the majors for decent careers. Tony Gwynn is the fourth person on the list. Unlike the others, Gwynn put the bat on the ball with authority, winning eight batting titles. He only struck out 434 times in 10232 PA.

The final spot on the list belongs to Bill Buckner. Buckner is more like the three middle infielders than Gwynn, even though Bill did win a batting title. He was a high average, low OBP batter, but with more power than your typical middle infielder due to hitting doubles. He certainly did not fit the stereotype of a first baseman, the way Adam Dunn does.

The fascinating thing to me is that Bucker wasn’t a very good hitter. His career BABIP comes in at .287, very close to his .289 career average. (You expect BABIP and BA to be close for low strikeout hitters.) BABIPs should be around .295 on average. Simply by not striking out, Bill Buckner managed a 20 year career despite being someone who did not hit the ball with much authority!

If Adam Dunn can’t get his strikeouts under control, his career could be over at age 33. Meanwhile, the low K batters can just keep rolling along with enough hits to make them look good.