STRIKE OUTS, PRODUCTIVE OUTS AND WHATNOT
Buster Olney of ESPN.com wrote this article about what are termed "productive outs".

There is this myth that the "Moneyball" style of play that Oakland started doesn't think productive outs are important, that somehow striking out is no different than any other out. Many SABRquixotics will make statements like "how is a ground out different than a strike out?". The answer is simple. You have no chance of getting on-base when you strike out (unless you're banking on the strike out+wild pitch/passed ball combo to get on first, but even then that only works when first is unoccupied or there are two outs).

This quote, from the SABRmetricians bible Moneyball (page 171), proves the point.

"...The strike out was the most expensive thing a hitter routinely could do. There had been a lie at the heart of the system to train A's minor league hitters. To persuade young men to be patient, to work the count, to draw walks, to wait for the pitcher to make a mistake that they could drive out of the park, the A's hitting coaches had to drill into hitters' heads the idea that there was nothing especially bad about striking out. "For a long time I think they believed that a strike out was no different from making any other out," said Paul [DePodesta]. But it is." Ideally what you wanted was for the hitter neither to strike out, nor to adjust his approach to the task at hand simply to avoid striking out."

There have been studies done by Rob Neyer and others about how pitchers have no control over balls that are hit in play. Here is one part of Neyer's research.

Bill James and a guy named Vorus McCracken actually first came across the idea that pitchers might not have any control over a ball once it is put in play. Of course that also is covered in Moneyball.

Anyway, I am getting away from my point. Strike outs are the worst thing a hitter can do, because even if you ground out weakly or hit a soft-fly you have somechance of getting on-base. Watch a game and see how many jam-shot singles there are. Not every hit is a line-drive. Strike outs are an evil byproduct of drawing walks, because just by nature the more pitches you see the more times you're going to hit with two strikes. So strikeouts aren't as bad as old-school baseball guys may have believed, but they are still probably a lot worse than many SABRmetricians or SABRquixotics or whatever you want to call them believe.