On May 21, 2013, a player went hitless in eight bats, resulting in a terrible night at the plate. For the minor league outfielder, it was the most futile offensive performance in organized baseball history.
You see, not only did he go hitless in those eight trips, he struck out seven times. That seventeenth strikeout left Dusty Robinson with the ignominious record for most strikeouts in a single game but, with the tremendous increase in strikeouts in the current format of America’s pastime, it very well could be broken this season.
Believe it or not, Robinson’s Stockdale Ports won that game, beating their California League rival in Lake Elsinore by eleven to nine. It probably helped that Stockdale had the services of a shortstop named Addison Russell, who would win the league’s Rookie of the Year award that season.
Despite the record number of strikeouts suffered that game, Robinson himself was a key part of the Ports’ offense that season. He led the club with twenty-one home runs and sixty-four RBIs, numbers even better than future Cubs star Russell.
Unfortunately, his inability to make consistent contact is reflected in his batting average for that 2013 season, as Robinson finished that year hitting just .210. The 23-year-old was released by the organization that winter and had to find work in independent baseball.
He spent 2014 and 2015 with the Rockford Aviators of the Frontier League, and the following season he suited up for the Schaumberg Boomers in the same league. Robinson, after slipping to a .106 batting average, was out of professional baseball last year.
Still only twenty years old, Robinson could resurface somewhere in the game. After all, Major League Baseball is currently in an era where no one blinks at how many times a batter blows out. One of their highest-paid stars, Giancarlo Stanton of the New York Yankees, struck out five times in a nine-inning game last month.
Stanton was just many of the reasons why April was the first month in baseball history in which the number of strikeouts was greater than the number of hits. The month of May so far has shown the same trend, so no one will be surprised when Robinson’s record of seven strikeouts is broken at the major league level.
