For the 11th consecutive season, Major League Baseball is going to set a record for strikeouts. The new marks are not simply incremental, either. In 2008, hitters struck out 32,884 times. At the current pace in 2018, they will strike out 43,163 times, which would obliterate the record of 40,104 set last year. This is a game careening toward a reckoning borne of inaction, and when nearly 23 percent of plate appearances end with a third strike, the culprit is clear.

It is no surprise, with MLB’s laissez-faire approach to strikeouts, that the sport-wide batting average has cratered to .241. The only two worse seasons in the game’s history were 1908, in the heart of the Dead Ball Era, and 1968, a year so disquieting it prompted the league to lower the mound from 15 inches to 10. Certainly this could be mildly anomalous, a function of the horrid weather, but over the last decade, the most a batting average has risen from April over the rest of the year was 8 points and the most a strikeout rate has dipped was .40 percent. April is no perfect indicator, but it does forecast trends quite well.

Individually, the samples remain too small to extrapolate – a point the great Russell Carleton made in a Twitter thread this week. There are, he said, some performances that are real, and some that are pure noise, and differentiating between the two is not altogether realistic. So as we bop around from name to name this week, consider this 10 Degrees’ pre-emptive caveat emptor.

Still, when Ian Happ and Miguel Sano are striking out in 44.6 percent of their plate appearances, as they were entering Sunday, that is cause for Cubs and Twins games to be rated TV-MA. Chris Davis set the record at 37.2 percent last year. In history, only 45 players have finished the season with a strikeout rate of 30 percent or higher. In 2018, the list is 21 players long.

It’s gotten to the point that 200 no longer is an ignominious number for strikeouts. It’s only happened 10 times. That number could double this year. And if he keeps playing as miserably as he has …

1. Yoenis Cespedes could become baseball’s first 300-strikeout man. In 89 plate appearances this season, he has punched out 37 times. Take that number over his 20 games, multiple it by 162 and the result: 299.7 strikeouts. Round up, for the sake of making this ridiculous exercise just a little more ridiculous, and voila: 300.

OK. Yoenis Cespedes is not going to strike out 300 times this year. (He already has missed a game, so 162 was an incorrect multiplier.) He may not even strike out 200. It’s harrowing still to see a player who never carried the reputation as one of the sport’s strikeout kings turn into the most whifftastic player of 2018. Cespedes’ career strikeout rate coming into the season was 20.5 percent. This year it’s 41.6 %.

A quarter of Cespedes’ strikes are coming on swings and misses. He is swinging at nearly 30 percent of first pitches. The livelihood of a free swinger exists on the expectation of contact. When contact vanishes, so does production. Cespedes is hitting .195/.258/.354. That the New York Mets have been what they’ve been with Cespedes a black hole batting in the No. 2 or 3 spot speaks even more to their impressiveness. Across town …

2. Giancarlo Stanton has been the Cespedes of the Bronx, with a strikingly similar line: .185/.283/.395. He went 0 for 4 Sunday with just one strikeout, which is something of an improvement, seeing as he entered the day punching out more than 35 percent of the time.

As vociferous as the Yankee Stadium crowd has been with its boos, this is one of those cases where patience is warranted. This is not the first month Stanton has struck out 35 percent of the time. There was May 2016 and September 2012. Fifteen times in his career he has finished a month in excess of 30 percent. And, yes, part of what catapulted him to the National League MVP award last season was cutting down on strikeouts. So it is troublesome. It’s also not mutually exclusive with him producing.

There is a reality about Giancarlo Stanton: He is always going to strike out a lot. It’s the price a team is willing to pay for the 500-foot home runs he hits when he’s not walking back to the dugout. The fear, of course, is that the Yankees tethered themselves to more than a quarter billion dollars of contract with a strikeout machine. To which the only answer is: Wait more than a month. Or two. Or even a year. Albatrosses manifest themselves over time, and Giancarlo Stanton isn’t anywhere close to one yet. And anyway, so long as …

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