With the Oakland Athletics going silently into the night as their season is over, the same goes for Adam Dunn, retiring from Baseball without even having a chance to take the field.

The A’s went with defense and left someone who hit 22 home runs this year (most of them on the White Sox) on the bench for the entire game. Other positions were sacrificed in favor of defense. Dunn simply had this to say: I guess the computer got me.

Dunn was hitting only .212 this season with a .316 on base percentage. He hasn’t been exactly stellar throughout his career when facing James Shields, who started for the Royals: Just 7-for-35 (.200) with 16 strikeouts. But Brandon Moss got two home runs off of him in a game that was about offense more than anything. Maybe Adam Dunn could have helped in that kind of scenario. But he didn’t get to play, and ends his 14-year career without playing in the postseason.

At some point, early on in his career, when Dunn was hitting 40 home runs a season like it was just another day in the office, it looked like he would give the record books a good scare and go down fighting. He finished his career with 462 home runs. His 14.9 at-bats per homer is 11th best in the history of Major League Baseball. He has six seasons of 40 home runs or more, the last of which coming in 2012 when playing for the Chicago White Sox. He hit 30 home runs or more on nine different occasions.

But there was the other side to Dunn, making him quite the inefficient slugger to use. He is third all-time in strikeouts with 2379, leading major league baseball in that category four times, including a whopping 222 in the 2012 season. He walked a lot, obviously, but not enough, and his batting average over the last four seasons has barely been rising over the .200. He hit a terrible .159 for the White Sox in 2011.

A couple of All-Star games, one player of the month award and even a few votes for NL MVP three separate times. But Dunn never left the mark he should have had on Major League Baseball because of how one-sided his career turned out to be. A bit hitter and nothing more, who often did more bad to his team than good, making his retirement go almost unnoticed, which wasn’t supposed to be the case considering how well he was doing during the mid 00’s.

Image: Source