What's that smell? It's Andruw Jones, stinkin' up L.A.

A season like the one Andruw Jones is having, it goes against everything we know about baseball. This sport is built on repetition and track records. Players who perform at a certain level keep on performing at that level until they get old or injured. Two other big-time talents, the Rockies' Troy Tulowitzki and the Yankees' Robinson Cano, also slumped horribly earlier this season. Tulowitzki was hitting .148 in late June, but has hit .376 since. Cano was hitting .150 in May, but has hit .303 since.

That's what players usually do, especially a player with as much experience as Jones. They are what they are. Look at the back of a baseball card of any player with extensive everyday experience in the big leagues. You'll see a progression in that player's first few seasons, then a peak, and finally a plateau that lasts for years.

And Jones' plateau was almost celestial. The number-crunching website baseball-reference.com compares statistics across generations and, through age 30, these were the six players whose stats most compared to Jones': Frank Robinson, Eddie Matthews, Johnny Bench, Al Kaline, Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey Jr. The first four are in the Hall of Fame. Griffey will get there on his first ballot. No telling what happens with Sosa, but clearly he has Hall of Fame numbers.

So does Jones. Or, so did Jones. After the 2006 season he was a future Hall of Famer. No doubt about it. His career batting average of .265 wasn't great, but he had 342 home runs and 1,023 RBI and nine Gold Gloves. And he was only 29 years old. As long as he didn't fall off a cliff, Jones was heading to Cooperstown.

He fell off the cliff.

Maybe he just ate his way off the cliff. The Dodgers' roster lists Jones at 240 pounds -- 70 pounds heavier than he weighed at his major league debut, and 30 more than a year ago in Atlanta. This isn't muscle, either. This is fat. And his bat speed has slowed noticeably. Jones won't play enough to get there, but for 600 at-bats he is on pace for 217 strikeouts, which would obliterate Ryan Howard's single-season record of 199.

As it is, Jones is having the most horrendous strikeout-to-hit season in baseball history, with 2.24 whiffs (74) for every hit (33). Of all the MLB players with at least 100 strikeouts in a season, Rob Deer has the record with a 2.19 whiff ratio, set in 1991. That was probably an established veteran's worst season in big league history, considering Deer hit .179. Then again, he did produce 25 home runs and 64 RBI.

Jones is at .161, three home runs, 14 RBI. It bears repeating.

Much better players than Jones have been demoted or released. Jeff Francoeur was having an All-Star season compared to Jones when Atlanta sent him to Triple A in July with a .234 average, eight home runs and 41 RBI. Richie Sexson was two or three times as productive as Jones when Seattle released him with 11 home runs and 30 RBI.

But Jones stays around, like a bad smell.

Take a big whiff, people. You'll never smell anything this bad again.