When I was a freshman in high school, my teams’ first baseball game saw me in centerfield and hitting ninth. I hit ninth because I was a bad hitter and I had missed a few practices. The first game I went 0-2…with two Ks…on a total of 6 pitches. I struck out because one reason: I wasn’t very good at hitting a baseball.
I think it is this logic of the strikeout that carries over with us from youth sports to professional sports. Case in point: Jack Cust. Mr. Cust is a walking machine, a power machine, and a strikeout machine. Though his power has been missing so far this year, he has still walked and struck out a ton. He’s only batting .155, but has an OBP of .380, meaning he has an unheard of difference of 225 points in his AVG and OBP. This is due to the fact that he’s second in the league with 20 walks.
He’s also struck out 24 times in 58 at bats.
This high strikeout rate has a large portion of A’s Nation howling that he is not being productive. They say he’s not clutch. They say he was a one-year wonder. They say he strikes-out because he’s not a good hitter, and his strikeouts are detrimental to the team. They say the A’s need to CUT HIM NOW!
Well, see, there’s a difference between Jack Cust and me my freshman year in high school: Jack Cust strikes out because he works deep into the count, and I struck out because I could not hit a baseball.
People don’t realize this though. Many baseball fans played organized baseball while young in little league or on their school’s team. In youth baseball striking out is the most embarrassing thing possible. It means you’re weak; it means you’re not good at hitting. Because the strike out is stored in our memory bank as the worst outcome, we then think that professional players that strike out a lot are bad players.
The bottom line is that a strikeout is an out. One out. Just like a pop fly is one out, and just like a groundout is an out. Sometimes a strike out is better than a groundout, like when grounding into a double play is a possibility.
And the fact remains true, despite his strikeouts, and slump so far in this short season, Jack Cust is an absolutely amazing hitter. Through an amazing track record, Cust has proven that he can hit like few others in the game can, as several stats indicate.
OPS+ is a stat that measures a player’s OPS (on-base percentage + slugging percentage) in relation to their ballpark. In 2007, Jack Cust put up an OPS+ of 147. For comparison, Alex Rodriguez’s career OPS+ is…147. Ryan Howard’s career OPS+ is 146. Todd Helton’s is 143, as is Gary Sheffield’s. All in all, Cust’s 2007 year was so good, that his OPS+ was better than the career OPS+ of the likes of Ken Griffey, Jr., Miguel Cabrera, David Ortiz, and Chipper Jones.
To get a different feel for Cust’s 2007 season, we can look at RC27 (Runs Created per 27 Outs). This stat attempts to quantify how many runs a team would score in a game if the lineup consisted entirely 1 player batting in all 9 places in the order. What’s important to note about RC27 is that it accounts for strikeouts, and punishes players for
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