Ryan Howard struck out yet again in his first atbat of tonight’s game. This brings his season total to 43 strikeouts! Coming into tonight, he had 42 strikeouts in 30 games. More importantly he has only had 108 recorded atbats (walks do not count as an atbat). This equals a 39% strikeout rate! With all of his atbats, walks included, he strikes out 1 out of every 3 trips to the plate. He is not a great fielder, even if his fielding percetage is .997. He is a slow first basemen who does not have to get to anything, and doesn’t have the opportunity to make many errors.
He is on pace to strikeout 226 times this season. He only has 19 hits and his batting average is an atrocious .176. He clearly needs more time off to figure out what is wrong with his swing. The one good thing that comes from this is that now Howard is losing ammunition for a big contract fast. At the beginning of the season he was thinking that he is worth Miguel Cabrera type money (8 years, $183 million). If he keeps this up, he won’t even be valuable enough to trade before his contract is up.
