Does Striking Out Actually Matter?  Thearon W. Henderson  We
often hear in scouting reports that a batter is "striking out
too much". Are high strikeout rates necessarily bad for a
hitter?   Nobody wants to strike out. I would know: on my high
school baseball team, I struck out in every single at-bat I had
(but not every plate appearance! I got hit by a pitch once!). At
its most basic level, hitting is about the bat making contact
with the ball, so in that sense a strikeout is the highest level
of failure imaginable. In a more strategic sense, a strikeout is
an "unproductive out"- it doesn't advance runners. Since as long
as the game's been around, strikeouts have been synonymous with
futility. Can you imagine if the song went "For it's 1, 2, pop-
up to the shortstop at the old ball game!"?  Last season, the
Oakland A's set the American League record for strikeouts.
Headlines reading "A's set record they shouldn't be proud of"
popped up all over the baseball world, but we laughed it off.
The A's were in playof