Bill Madden: Unprecedented rise in strikeouts is sapping power and fun out of game

Bill Madden probably hasn’t been this upset since the untimely death of Oscar Randolph Fladmark Jr.!

If you’re among the ever-dwindling Mets fan base grown weary of watching your Flushing lads striking out in record numbers while killing rally after rally in what has too often been unwatchable baseball, there is this consolation: You are not entirely alone.

In fact, what we are seeing in baseball — the huge spike in strikeouts accompanied by an alarming, steady decline in runs and homers — has become an epidemic that is only going to get worse. It’s an unfortunate proven fact that never was the game more popular than at the height of the steroid era in the late 1990s, when home runs were flying out of ballparks in bunches. Offense sells, at the same time there is nothing more boring than watching your team strike out 10 times in a game and score two or fewer runs. (In the Mets’ case, of course, all the strikeouts by their hitters might be somewhat more palatable if not compounded by continually bad bullpen work and shoddy defense.)

...Again, advantage pitchers — which, as baseball concluded in 1968, the “Year of the Pitcher,” in which the average major-league ERA was 2.98 — and runs per game had dipped to 6.84, the lowest since 6.77 in 1908 — isn’t good for business. As a result, the honchos enacted radical changes, lowering the pitcher’s mound from 15 inches to 10 in 1969 and then introducing the designated hitter in the American League in 1973. MLB is facing a similar crisis now — in which too many games across both leagues are going to resemble those dreadfully boring Mets-Marlins affairs of last summer — and baseball’s popularity will suffer.

Unfortunately, there may not be a solution this time, as most hitters in the game is conditioned to striking out and there is no longer any stigma attached to it. The pure hitter — such as Joe DiMaggio, who struck out 13 times in his great 1941 season in which he hit safely in 56 straight games and led the league with 125 RBI; Yogi Berra, who just three times in 19 seasons had more than 30 strikeouts; or Ted Kluszewski, the hulking 6-2, 225-pound Cincinnati Reds slugger who led the NL with 49 homers and 141 RBI in 1954 and struck out just 35 times — has become a dinosaur. The closest we’ve got is Albert Pujols, who never topped 65 strikeouts from 2003-09 when he was consistently hitting 40-plus homers and knocking in 100-plus runs for the Cardinals.

It’s kind of a sad commentary, isn’t it, that teams routinely striking out 1,200-1,300 times a season is looked upon as no big deal, just as players striking out 150 or more times has become acceptable. You just wonder, with runs and homers decreasing the way they are, how long the fans are going to find this kind of baseball acceptable?