Colson Montgomery broke baseball's single-season strikeout record on Friday, and the most interesting thing he did all weekend was refuse to let it be the headline of his own year. Asked about it, the White Sox infielder went to the "positives" from his second season in the majors. That is not spin. That is a young hitter who understands that the record is a symptom of the era he plays in, not a verdict on the player he is.
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story is a punchline and I am not writing the easy version. The Colson Montgomery strikeout record is real, it is his now, and it will sit in the encyclopedia forever. It is also, if you look at how this mark has moved over the last half century, the most predictable record in the sport.
What is the MLB single-season strikeout record?
Checked the almanac on this one, because the trend line tells the whole story. Bobby Bonds struck out 189 times in 1970 and that number stood for 34 years. Thirty-four. Then Adam Dunn got to 195 in 2004, Mark Reynolds went 204 in 2008, and Reynolds pushed it to 223 the very next summer. Dunn came back and put up 222 in 2012 and did not even get it.
| Season | Player | Strikeouts |
|---|---|---|
| 1970 | Bobby Bonds | 189 |
| 2004 | Adam Dunn | 195 |
| 2008 | Mark Reynolds | 204 |
| 2009 | Mark Reynolds | 223 |
| 2012 | Adam Dunn | 222 |
One record survived three and a half decades. The next three fell inside of five years. That is not a generation of worse hitters. That is velocity, that is sweepers, that is bullpens built to throw one inning as hard as humanly possible, and that is an offensive environment that pays for damage and shrugs at the walk back to the dugout. Reynolds hit 44 homers the year he set the mark. Nobody was filing him under failure.
What Colson Montgomery said about the strikeout record
He pointed at the positives. Short answer, and the right one. A second-year player who takes his lumps in public and still talks about what worked is telling you something about how he processes a bad week, and that matters a lot more for his next three years than any one counting stat. The guys who get buried by this stuff are the ones who start trying to protect the number instead of trying to hit the baseball.
I do not have his full season line in front of me, so I am not going to pretend to grade the bat here. What I will say is that strikeout totals are the loudest, dumbest number on a young hitter's page. They move fastest with two strikes, they move fastest against the best arms, and they tend to come down as the swing decisions catch up to the swing itself. Contact is a skill. So is learning which pitches to leave alone in October cold weather in Chicago.
What comes next for Montgomery and the White Sox
The winter, and it should be a busy one for him. This is the offseason where the swing gets tightened, the two-strike approach gets its own drill block, and somebody on the South Side coaching staff earns their check by making chase rate the only number in the room. The talent that got him to the majors at this age has not evaporated because the K column got ugly.
And the rest of the league keeps moving. The manager carousel already has a seat open in Seattle, Houston just took an AL West title at 81-81, and Philadelphia clinched the last National League wild card on the final day. Baseball will be loud for the next month. Montgomery gets to go be quiet, which might be exactly what he needs.
What I am watching next: what his swing looks like in March. Not the strikeout total. The decisions.