The Three True Outcomes, or Adam Dunn's Wonderful, Sad Career

When Adam Dunn broke into the Major Leagues with the Cincinnati Reds in July of 2001, bigness seemed relatively uncomplicated, at least within the confines of a baseball field. This was the year of Barry Bonds' 73 home runs, a year whose All-Star rosters were stuffed with sleeve-busters. In Texas, Alex Rodriguez was continuing to disprove the notion that big men could not play short; in New York, Roger Clemens was winning a Cy Young. Notions that for decades had been pillars of scouting and training-room strategy--too much brawn hurts a player's range in the field and flexibility at the plate were first among these--faded away. Size, for the ballplayer, had become a simple blessing.

Dunn, though, was a different kind of big. He was a lug in the classical mold, 6'6" and 235 pounds (he would tack on 50 more by career's end) with a pillowy chin and arms like the sleeves of a winter coat. He was the kind of big that made mentioning his home state of Texas seem redundant.

The slugger's frame provided power, to be sure, but he also had some old-fashioned faults. His left-handed swing was a full-tilt hack, lacking entirely the flashy hands and ascetic balance exemplified by Bonds. He was a base-clogger of the first degree and a miserable fielder, initially in left and then at first, before a merciful move to the AL let him fulfill his designated-hitting destiny. Dunn appeared set apart from his broad-shouldered brethren, whose abilities derived from the fact that they all seemed to have smaller, more precise men at their synaptic controls. This was clearly not him.

Even as a rookie, Dunn was a variant of the weary giant archetype; he looked as if he had spent too many days knocking his forehead on door frames or pinching himself into middle airplane seats. He made bigness seem like a burden.

In 66 games in the late summer of 2001, Dunn hit 19 homers, struck out 74 times, walked 38 times, and hit one triple, which would prove one-tenth of his career total. His was a simple game. If he made contact, the ball would go a long way; if he missed, he would do so badly; if he perceived that he couldn't hit something, he would try to take a walk.

Over the course of the following 13 years, Dunn would lose almost all of whatever nuance existed in him at the start; his homers, walks, and strikeouts all rose until he ranked among the league leaders in all three categories perennially, and his batting average plummeted. Defense excepted, he hardly ever had occasion to break into a sprint; he could go days without once taking a wide turn around first.

As Dunn's career went on--with the Reds for a few years, then with the Arizona Diamondbacks, Washington Nationals, Chicago White Sox, and Oakland A's for various stretches--his bigness became a fraught thing. Some of the big men with the quick hands stuffed themselves into big suits and wagged their quick fingers at Congressional boards or flicked quick fingers at their nervous goatees during dramatically lit television interviews.

Dunn, meanwhile, kept taking his wide swings, hammering and flailing in sporadic proportion. 0-for-whatevers came and went, marked off by 430-foot blasts and unrushed, heavy-footed trips around the bases. During this era of suspicious size, Dunn was a corrective, the rare mammoth with the old, familiar impediments. He looked increasingly resigned to his status, his muted reactions to long shots and swings-and-misses betraying a monkish acceptance of his talent's intrinsic patterns. Whatever happened, he'd blow a bubble and jog in the appointed direction, knowing something else would come soon enough.

In Kansas City, in August of 2012, Dunn hit his 400th career home run. Bubble, jog, some quick dugout handshakes, a smattering of traveling White Sox fans lifting punning signs: HE DUNN IT. In this instance, the tame show of pleasure may have owed more to a holding-out for something better than to any philosophical bent. Chicago was up a game and a half in the division over the underwhelming Detroit Tigers, and Dunn had never been to the postseason. If he could manage a generous parceling of whiffs and wallops down the stretch, though, he might make it. Best to keep his head down.

The White Sox would lose 11 of their final 14 that year and finish three games back in the division. Dunn went 2-for-22 down the stretch with 11 strikeouts. It was hard to watch without feeling a little bad for the guy. But then, Adam Dunn was not made for watching.

Dunn retired from baseball last week, making official what he had promised at the end of last season. In that final campaign, Dunn had finally made the postseason, kind of. At August's waiver trade deadline, the White Sox sent Dunn to the A's, and he was part of the bench in their 12-inning, 9-8 Wild Card loss to the Kansas City Royals. He was not called into action.

It is fitting that Dunn was more notion than player in his final game. Over the years, he had become a treasured study of the sabermetrics community, a real-life exemplar of the "three true outcomes," those plays that only hitter and pitcher affect: walks, strikeouts, and homers. That Billy Beane acquired him on his way out the door seemed inevitable; that Dunn spent that lone postseason game as vague threat instead of active participant was poetic. Those three true outcomes fit the long slog of the regular season, when bad weeks have time to be offset by good ones, but the mythos of the playoffs requires improvisers. Dunn could never be an on-demand hero. He was a long-haul man.

Dunn's legion of detractors--casual though they were; he lacked the flair to inspire true vitriol--mostly ragged on his style, the one-note aspect of his play. There was power, or its absence, and there was nothing else. It always seemed to me, though, that their gripe was not stylistic but temporal. Nobody would've minded if Dunn had hit homers every night, but those intermediary periods of inaction irked. The ideal ballplayer can advertise his talents even during an 0-for-5 game. Dunn, on the other hand, could DH and fail to make contact even once, and the outing could not be termed an outright failure. The strikeouts were just deferred payments on the previous week's moon shot.

This was Adam Dunn's contribution to baseball, frustrating as it could be in the moment: he expanded its scale. Dunn's basic unit was not the at-bat, the inning, or even the game. He worked in months and seasons. He was a futures-trader whose hard, simple, hole-riddled swing did more good than harm, given enough time. He could make for a rough watch--God help anyone who dared gut out observing a Dunn oh-fer with Hawk Harrelson on the call--but we didn't have to watch him. See that big swing once, memorize it, and apply it to the box score.

The core sadness attending a fine career--462 homers, .854 lifetime OPS--is that Dunn appeared somewhat sympathetic to his critics' cause. He, too, would rather have flicked pitches the other way and gone first-to-third. Entering the 2004 season, he told Sports Illustrated, "People assume I can't hit for average. I've hit for average my whole life, until I got up here. It's not because I can't. It's because people have tried to get me to hit more homers." That year, he led the majors in strikeouts.

The eventual sabermetric embrace of his skill set seemed a meager satisfaction. Following Oakland's Wild Card loss, when Dunn told ESPN of his impending retirement, he said, "I guess the computer got me." The line was a bitter twist on the ballplayer's traditional clipped farewell, wherein he recognizes the game's passing him by. Dunn had become a figurehead of someone else's revolution; from afar, he looked ready to get rid of the mantle.

It will not be long, I suspect, until Adam Dunn's name has evaporated almost entirely from the world's baseball stadiums and sports bars; he'll play a bit part in the Hall of Fame anti-drama in a few years, and that will be all. Dunn was worth having around, though. He added one to the millions of ways baseball could be played, and to the millions of little miseries it could inflict. His was not a game that encouraged rhapsody, but they can't all be.