Stephen Strasburg is hurt again. But he has proved he’ll come back strong.
Parts of his career reflect off all of its other parts, like mirrors reflecting mirrors, giving a temporary image of his work but one that is sure to change again soon.
As with a kaleidoscope, even if you try to hold your view of Strasburg still — freeze it on the view you want to see — something is likely to shift slightly. Even a seemingly minor change can produce a much different image, recasting the past and calling the future into question.
In a few months, Strasburg has gone from a symbol of glory to a black cloud of worry with $35 million per year due him through 2026. Strasburg’s injury is rare but not unknown in baseball. However, in line with the ironic thread in Strasburg’s career, an injury that’s far more common in typists has knocked the chances of the Nats repeating as champs from slim to extremely remote.
Supposedly, Strasburg’s prognosis is good to return to normal health in 2021. But “cut a tendon in the wrist” appears in every description of the surgery that I can find.
How should we feel about Strasburg’s injury, aside from wishing him well? For many, he’s a hard player to analyze and sometimes polarizing. So I always retreat to the facts and am generally shocked. On inspection, his value to the Nats since 2012 has been slightly higher than that of any other player — which I wouldn’t have suspected, considering his injuries. As such, his ability to recover, again, is key to the Nats remaining contenders.
From 2012, when he returned from elbow ligament replacement surgery, to 2019, Strasburg was seventh among major league pitchers in the most sanctified of advanced stats, Wins Above Replacement, with 33.3 (according to FanGraphs). That’s just ahead of Jacob deGrom, David Price and Gerrit Cole.
In that period, only five pitchers won at least 50 more games than they lost: Max Scherzer (80), Zack Greinke (79), Clayton Kershaw (76), Price (55) and Strasburg (52). Strasburg is also 17th in starts and innings in that span, which sounds almost durable, especially since several of the innings-eaters above him are just tough .500 pitchers.
Most stunning to me, FanGraphs estimates Strasburg’s value to the Nats from 2012 to 2019 at $256.3 million — tied for the sixth best in MLB. And that doesn’t count his value in winning a title. The Nats paid him about $110 million. Even if FanGraphs is being generous, Strasburg has been a bargain.
In the Nats’ run from 2012 to 2019, with five trips to the playoffs and four National League East titles, their leaders in WAR were Strasburg (33.3), Anthony Rendon (32.7), Scherzer (32.5 in only five years), Bryce Harper (30.5) and Gio González (21.8), with nobody else even in sight.
But to understand the irregular step functions in his career, it helps to stand next to Stras. For a pitcher, he’s huge. For an NFL tight end, he would look normal, including all the rip-your-arms-off muscle definition. Harper is impressive, but Strasburg looks like he could curl Bryce.
For years at spring training, you would see Strasburg, a workout obsessive, doing lunges with massive dumbbells in each hand, going up and down the narrow corridors. Look out — here he comes again, like some bearded prehistoric creature with a six-foot stride.
Each offseason, he would experiment with different body-refining programs to explore the perfect pitching physique. Once, he used long beach runs to try to trim down a bit. But in the end, he’s a massive machine who creates so much torque that he endangers the ligaments, tendons, muscles and joints in his kinetic chain from shoulder to elbow to wrist to hand.
Yet to make his pitches dance, he must release them with a soft touch, a snap of the wrist and a flip of the fingers that maximize spin and bring deft command. The whole process is a magnificent contradiction, like expecting a Tyrannosaurus rex to spin a top. As he balances all of the parts of his delivery, most of them unnatural to the human body, you wonder whether some part of him will be wrenched off.
I remind myself that Strasburg has made more than 200 starts, and accomplished all of this, since he got his second arm. He only made 12 starts with his original model — the one that clocked 102 mph at times — before it broke.
In my book, you have to appreciate what he became after that, even if he missed some starts along the way. Seen that way, in a career full of recoveries, 2020 is part of the whole package. After he prepared for spring training, was shut down by the pandemic, then started back up, all while being taken out of his beloved routines, his wrist was the weak link in the chain that broke. It’s not a shock.
Be glad it wasn’t his shoulder or elbow — where injuries permanently damage the careers of 32-year-old pitchers. But it’s just not Strasburg’s lot in pitching life to have Scherzer’s swimmer’s physique and genes that provide “hinges” that don’t break. It’s his fate to be the big engine that will blow some gaskets.
Flip our bleak perspective of the moment: If Strasburg had been hurt a year ago, think about what baseball and D.C. would have missed. And we would never have known. Sometimes the best luck is just sequencing.
If you assume, as I do, that Strasburg, constructed as he is, will have injuries, then Strasburg having an injury in 2020 — assuming he comes back whole in 2021 — is about as good as bad gets. This 60-game “season,” with seven-inning doubleheader games, is just a baseball farce — and, with time to fill, we appreciate it.
But October was drama we’ll never forget. For a month, Strasburg did nothing but repeat, repeat and repeat again all of his curves, change-ups and heaters. Snap, spin, fire and repeat 200 times a game — counting warmups and between-innings tosses. That will do an efficient job of narrowing the carpal tunnel in your pitching hand.
What is remarkable about Strasburg is not his “inconsistency” because of injuries but his consistency, so far, in always working his way back. Instead of moaning, “He got hurt again,” why not admire all the returns, too?
Nobody knows for sure, but the way to bet is that, when the pandemic is over, we’ll have something that is both normal and extraordinary to watch again.
Stephen Strasburg will be back.
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