Stephen Strasburg never moved on from Washington. He moved in.

“It was a big shock for me, coming all the way across the country and going into pro ball,” Strasburg said. “… It was always like, man, first chance in the offseason, going back home, back home to San Diego.”

In March, when baseball shut down because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Strasburg took the first chance he could to return home — to Northern Virginia, an easy drive down the George Washington Parkway from the only professional office he has known. This is where he spends his offseasons. This is where his two daughters, ages 6 and 3, go to school. This is where the younger daughter was born, right at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. Stephen Strasburg, with San Diego in his blood, has become a Washingtonian.

“The more time you spend out on the East Coast, it kind of loses its intimidation,” Strasburg said. “It’s kind of just become what I know. I go back to San Diego for the holidays. But really, I don’t really go back. Washington is where I am.”

Now, with a new seven-year, $245 million deal that will keep him a National until he is 38, he is at peace with life 2,650 miles from where he grew up because home is where he lives now.

“It was more than monetary calmness,” teammate Ryan Zimmerman said. “I think it was: He knew where he was going to be.”

To get comfortable where he was going to be required not only the growth that takes place between ages 21 and 31. It required retooling himself as a pitcher and a person.

“It’s kind of where I grew up,” he said.

With all of us watching.

It is a simple question, put to Strasburg during a wide-ranging, 45-minute interview on a patio just outside the clubhouse at the Nationals’ spring training complex in West Palm Beach, Fla.: Are you a patient person? The answer is quick.

“No,” Strasburg said.

He sighed. And explained.

“I tell myself that every day,” he said. “I’ve learned this about myself over the years: I want it now. I want to see the execution now. I want to see the results. It’s been such a process over the years to just have the discipline to say: ‘Hey, you can control how you handle your mechanics, how you execute your pitches. But once the ball leaves your hand, that is completely out of your control.’

“That’s still something that I struggle with, because this game is based on what happens after it leaves your hand, but you can’t control that.”

In the decade since his rookie season, Strasburg has changed in obvious ways as a pitcher. That lightning bolt of a summer, his four-seam fastball averaged 97.9 mph, and touching 100 wasn’t rare. Last summer, that four-seamer averaged 94.3 mph, the lowest of his career, according to data compiled by FanGraphs.

When he came up, he had a windup that made some scouts and coaches leery of the strain he could put on his arm; he now pitches exclusively from the stretch. The first time the Nationals reached the playoffs, the club held him out, part of its protocol following his recovery from Tommy John surgery. When the Nationals made their fifth postseason appearance this past fall, Strasburg went 5-0 with a 1.98 ERA and 47 strikeouts with four walks over 36⅓ innings — and won that World Series MVP.

“He couldn’t have been better,” General Manager Mike Rizzo said.

The transformation in how he pitches is rivaled, though, by the transformation in how he carries himself. Early in his career — and he knows this — Strasburg would greet an error or a bad bounce with slumped shoulders, rolled eyes or both. Analyzing Strasburg’s body language became something of a D.C. parlor game. He looked, frankly, eternally pissed off.

“I credit my dad for that,” Strasburg said. “It’s kind of the way we walk. It’s kind of the way our faces are. If I’m not smiling, it looks like I’m grimacing. Like I’m mad. You kind of get that persona of being a little intimidating.”

As a pitcher, he is just that. As a person?

“I think Stras, at some point, almost stopped caring about what people thought,” said Zimmerman, the only member of the championship team to predate Strasburg. “He just started to say: ‘Listen, I’m going to take care of myself. I’m going to be the best version of me.’ He’s very reserved, and I think he does that on purpose. But if you sit down and have a couple beers with him, he’s got a great personality. He’s quick. And he’s very intelligent.”

For most of the past decade, that Strasburg — quick, intelligent, fun guy for beers — has been hidden from Washington fans by Strasburg himself. The city knows Zimmerman, Mr. National, and Max Scherzer, three times a Cy Young winner. It knows Capitals superstar Alex Ovechkin. It knows Wizards mainstays John Wall and Bradley Beal. Even the NFL team’s most prominent players during Strasburg’s time here — former offensive lineman Trent Williams, quarterbacks Robert Griffin III and Kirk Cousins, cornerback DeAngelo Hall, etc. — were outgoing, available and, to some degree, understood as public personalities.

For most of his career, Strasburg has spoken to the media after each of his starts but infrequently between them. In the clubhouse, he is not an easy person to stop. His gaze is straight ahead. He walks with a purpose. He is at work, and if work doesn’t leave time for people to understand him better, so be it.

“Personally, all that stuff doesn’t matter to me,” Strasburg said. “It’s not very important to me. I don’t think I’m really starving for attention. If it’s there, it’s there, and I’ll deal with it. But the things that really draw me to this game is what happens on the field and in the dugout.”

So into that vacuum stepped the analysis of how Strasburg comported himself when things went awry. “He matured,” is how pitching coach Paul Menhart put it. He also became more self-aware.

“As I’ve gotten older, it’s become more of a challenge, because you’ve been in that position before and then you’ve seen it kind of take you off mentally,” Strasburg said. “If you go out there and give up a homer or something, you start to think, ‘Here we go again.’

“But it can’t be that way. It has to be like: ‘Here we go. I’m going to prove it to myself that I am unflappable.’ There’s times where, yeah, I do sense myself shrugging my shoulders and stuff, and that’s always a struggle, because you’re fighting to be perfect.”

The culmination of that evolution came this past October, when the Nationals faced elimination in Game 6 of the World Series in Houston. Handed a 1-0 lead before he took the mound in the first, Strasburg allowed a double, uncorked a wild pitch, gave up a sacrifice fly and, with one out, coughed up Alex Bregman’s home run. After the inning, staff members indicated he might have been tipping off his change-up. Still, might this get away from him?

“All he did was throw 8⅓ innings,” Rizzo said.

He didn’t give up another run. The Nats won going away. The next night on the field at Minute Maid Park, he was handed the keys to a Chevrolet Corvette C8 as the World Series MVP.

Menhart first came across Strasburg in October 2009, when the former was a Class A pitching coach for the Nationals and the latter was the first pick of the previous June’s draft. They worked together in the Arizona Fall League, five uneven starts that represented Strasburg’s introduction to pro ball.

“He was competitive, hungry, everything you want,” Menhart said. “Didn’t know it all. Still doesn’t know it all.”

Yet he largely had to find his own way. No coach wants to mess up the phenom.

“When I was younger, it was almost like I wanted more instruction,” Strasburg said. “But it was more of the hands-off approach, like, ‘Don’t mess with him.’ That was kind of strange to me, because I just was under the assumption that being the young guy, like: ‘Hey, I’m an open book. I’d love to just learn as much as I can.’ A lot of it was through trial and error on my own.”

So there were both trials and errors. Slowly, though, Strasburg has become a willing and able lecturer on that process. Pick a year of Strasburg’s development, and you’ll probably be able to find a story about how he has become more vocal, that he is asserting himself more. There’s truth in all of it, and it has resulted in a veteran who is much more apt to offer his opinion, at 31, than he was at 21.

“Honestly, I was kind of the beginning of the MLB Network, and now it’s just overkill to where it’s like every single prospect that comes up, it’s like: Boom. Here’s his debut and this and that,” Strasburg said. “That’s all great, but I think it creates this false sense of: You made it. As soon as you get called up, that’s the easier part. The harder part is staying here and staying successful at this level.”

Back in February at spring training, Nationals Manager Dave Martinez watched Strasburg complete his work for the day yet remain in the dugout for an entire Grapefruit League game — not mandatory for veterans — to watch a couple of young Nats pitch.

“He’s having these unbelievable conversations with Paul,” Martinez said. “He’s taking more of a responsibility to try to help his teammates, especially the young pitchers.”

He also is taking a wider sense of responsibility for the organization — a fledgling franchise when he arrived, a championship team now. Several Nationals were unhappy with the flight arrangements during the postseason, when families were excluded from some flights in the early rounds, a development first reported by the Athletic. Though former outfielder Jayson Werth argued for upgrades in food services and other care when he arrived in 2011, Strasburg went into contract negotiations this past offseason with a list of suggestions that had nothing to do with years or dollars.

“Money really wasn’t the issue,” Strasburg said. “… The ultimate priority was continuing the development of the organization as being a destination for free agents and just being world class in every aspect. That was the most important to me because that’s something that I really care about. You can only see that from a player’s perspective. That’s the reputation I want for the Washington Nationals.”

What he found was a willingness, on the part of the ownership of the Lerner family, to listen.

“They were extremely receptive to all the things we brought up,” Strasburg said. “They were like: ‘Hey, we’re on it. We’re going to get it taken care of.’ And so now my job is to be a baseball player.”

Which is all Stephen Strasburg ever really wanted: to play baseball and, when his work day is done, quietly drive to a place he can call home. That it’s on the East Coast, not the West, that it’s in Washington, not California, would have surprised his 21-year-old self. But he is 31 now, and there’s a chance he will never pitch a game in another uniform than the only one he has ever known.

“There’s a comfort,” he said, “in knowing where you’re going to be.”