A new season of baseball is starting this weekend.  Many articles are being written now about the current state of baseball.  One interesting thing is that the rate of strikeouts (this is when a batter swings three times and misses) is the highest in the career of the sport.

The New York Times has a great collection of graphs in today’s paper.  The top graph shows you the rate of strikeouts per game for every team in the last 112 years.  Every point has an associated label — you can easily find the unusual teams each season with respect to strikeouts.

I see that the 1980 Texas Rangers struck out an average of 3.61 times per game.  In contrast, the 2010 Arizona Diamondbacks struck out an average of 9.44 times each game.