Rob Deer holds the record for the lowest batting average, post-1900, of any player to qualify for the league batting title (using the modern standard of 3.1 plate appearances per scheduled game). In 1991, for the Detroit Tigers, he batted a robust .179.
This record had seemed unapproachable, but White Sox “slugger” Adam Dunn has it in his sights. With 34 games remaining on the schedule, he is batting .165 over 431 plate appearances.
Setting the record, therefore, will involve a double chase involving getting enough plate appeances but maintaining a low enough average.
Plate appearances shouldn’t be a problem. To be sure, manager Ozzie Guillen has given up on playing Dunn against left-handers, owing to his eye-popping 3-for-81 (.037) performance, which would shame a National League pitcher. But even if Dunn plays only two-thirds of the remaining games, and averages four plate appearances per game, he’ll make it to 521 plate appearances, well over the requirement of 502.
But maintaining a low enough average–if he hits even .220 the rest of the way, Dunn will pass Deer. Avoiding a hot streak will be a challenge, but I think Dunn can pull it off. He has the right disciplined, focused approach to staying cold–waving weakly at high fastballs and flailing helplessly at breaking balls in the dirt.
I enjoy baseball, but I’m not a religious watcher, nor follower of any particular team. Over the 4th of July holiday, we had some friends in town who wanted to go to a ball game, so we went to one of the Sox v. KC games.
Dunn came up to bat, and my jaw dropped when I saw his stats up on the big screen. .171!? And he’s the DH!? What the hell? By the end of the game his average stood at .168.
Look, I understand that nobody’s perfect, and that hitters have slumps. But when your primary function is to hit. the. ball, you need to do a whole lot better than .168 (or the .165 he’s at now). How can you possibly justify keeping somebody like that on the roster? There has to be some kind of mechanism in a contract to let a guy go who’s performing that miserably, doesn’t there? Hell, they’d probably be better off not even having a DH and letting their pitchers hit. They couldn’t really do much worse, could they?
Unfortunately, the White Sox have 56 million reasons for keeping him on their roster–the $14 million that they have to pay him this year and each of the three following years.
Of course, at some point paying a guy $56 million not to play becomes better than paying him $56 million to make outs.
Is there really no way to avoid paying him? Are players’ contracts so airtight that the owner is obligated to pay a guy who sucks this much at his job?
Not to keep piling on the poor guy, but he is also striking out at the potentially historic rate of 35.5% over a full season. Even Mark Reynolds never achieved that (though only by the slimmest of margins). Has anyone had a full season of a higher K rate?
I honestly think I could step in and hit for a higher average right now, and I haven’t swung a bat against live pitching in years. And never against major league caliber pitching. Pretty confident though, the bar is pretty low.
You are wrong. You would lucky to hit .010 in the majors. I don’t see how “the bar” being at .165 is “low” for some over-the-hill mouth breather like you.
I have to agree with TheNiggler: if you’ve never tried to hit something moving at 90 MPH, you have no realistic understanding of just how hard it is. And that’s just a straight-down-the-middle fastball. Throw in pitchers’ throwing curves, sliders and other pitches with movement, and the fact that they paint the corners - no way is .165 achievable for someone who never played with the pros.
Yes, they are airtight. All MLB salaries are guaranteed (at least, all the ones I know about). They can cut him, but they still have to pay him.
The only way the White Sox avoid this is if they put him on waivers and somebody claims him (fat chance) or they trade him without also agreeing to pay his salary (fat chance). I guess another possibility is if he gets injured and the contract was insured against injury (unlikely for someone his age, I think).
Even then, Adam Dunn will get paid every cent of the contract the team signed.
Thanks Freddy. . Todd Wright of Yahoo Sports overnight railed against the Sox signing him… Wright calls Adam Dunn the “Human Home Run Derby”… I think the Nationals are laughing their ass off…
Ozzie is really stuck… you really have to play him and hope a Dan Uggla hot streak happens…
Has there been any good explanation of Dunn’s dropoff in stats other than the “old-player skills” tag that gets pulled out when a slugger reaches his 30’s? Even for an all-or-nothing guy, his season stats were fairly consistent until this year: never had an OPS+ below 114, and six straight years of hitting either 38 or 40 homers (including four straight of hitting exactly 40, which has to be some kind of record). You’d expect a guy like Dunn to decline, but not that fast…so what happened?
I’m always interested in futility records like this. Craig Counsell went 45 plate appearances without a hit this season, which tied the streak for a position player in baseball history. But that’s less surprising since he was never a great hitter, and he’s now 40 and doesn’t play every day. Dunn’s woes are kind of a mystery and by all accounts he’s supposed to be a really nice guy. I don’t know how he deals with it every day. I’d be very demoralized, not to say that he isn’t.
I, for one, sincerely hope Dunn doesn’t mess up Rob Deer’s record. I loved watching Bobby do what he did best – strike out or hit bombs. I’d have to confirm it, but last I checked he had several of the highest contact-free seasons of all-time. He broke his wrist one time while striking out. That is SO awesome! Plus he was actually a decent outfielder, as I recall. Not great, but decent.
I don’t think I’d be blaming his age for this slump – 31 should be right in his prime, which is no doubt why the Sox ponied up that kind of dough for him, figuring they’d get him at his very best.
C’mon, Adam! Even a mediocre September will blow you past Deer’s numbers – figure out the AL pitching and get it done!
This is also a change that has to have been very much unexpected. The guy’s never hit for average, but he’s always hit for power, produced RBIs and generally been a productive, useful hitter, even for the past 3-4 years. If you bench him, he never gets a chance to return to form.
Sometimes it does just happen like that; I can’t find anything quite as abrupt as Dunn’s decline, but take Dale Murphy, whose year-by-year OPS+ goes 142 149 149 152 121 157 (age 31) and then 106 89 99 103 done. And I don’t think anyone’s ever really explained that one.
By most accounts Dunn is something less than a conditioning fanatic, which may account for his early decline. Another factor: After going 4-for-14 with a home run and 4 walks during the first four games of the season, Dunn went down on April 6 with an emergency appendectomy.
He wanted to be a stud and play the next night, but the team held him out for six games. It wasn’t enough. When he came back his timing was waaaaay off and he never recovered. In hindsight he should have gone on the 15-day disabled list and then done a minor league rehab to get his stroke back.
Of course other guys struggle after a layoff and then quickly get it back. Dunn never has. You keep waiting and waiting for the light to go on, but it never does.
TheNiggler, insults are not allowed in this forum. If you want to insult another user, you must do so in the Pit. Do not do this again in the Game Room.
