The Strasburg situation in Washington has to be the most bungled, mismanaged, unnecessary, and flat-out stupid controversy of the 2012 season.
It has been terrible for Strasburg. According to his manager, Strasburg is ‘torn up’ about the decision. In a season where he’s a) recovering from surgery, b) continuing to learn how to, you know, pitch in the major leagues, and c) doing a fantastic job of it, Strasburg has had to contend with the added annoyance of having to answer months of questions about his team’s decision to impose an innings pitched limit, which will keep him from playing down the stretch, in the postseason, and potentially in the World Series. Now he faces the difficult task of feigning enthusiasm as the team he helped lead to an improbably division championship attempts to win the World Series, while he watches from the sidelines.
It has been, and has the potential to be, frustrating for the other National players. Most of the Nats players, I’m guessing, would like to play in the World Series this year. And most of them have at least some understand that their chances of winning that World Series would better if Strasburg, one of the top-ten pitchers in the league, had the chance to pitch for them once and a while.
It has the potential to be frustrating for fans of the Nationals. This has been a fantastic, exciting season in D.C., but if the Nats don’t win the World Series, the entire legacy of this 2012 season will be one unanswerable question: ‘What if they had played Strasburg?’
* * *
I feel slightly bad for the Nationals management: the higher ups with the team probably didn’t expect to be in contention in the NL East this year. After all, 2012 was the year the Marlins were supposed break out. And the Phillies and Braves weren’t exactly slouches last year. The Nationals finished 21.5 games back last year: they weren’t supposed to win this year.
Viewed within the contexts of those expectations, the Nationals decision to limit Strasburg’s innings this season made perfectly good sense: And the decision to start pitching him in April rather than June was reasonable: give the kid Opening Day, and shut him down when the team is trailing some combination of Philadelphia, Miami, and Atlanta in September.
The difficulty arose when the Nationals turned out to be contenders. At the end of June, the Nationals were in first place, 3.5 games ahead of the Mets. At the end of July, they were still in first, 2.5 games ahead of the Braves.
The failure of the Nationals is a failure to adjust to a new set of circumstances. When 2012 was supposed to be a building year, it made sense to shut their young ace down in September. When it became clear that the Nationals had the chance to win a championshipin 2012, that plan stopped making sense.
; ; ;
On a game-usage level, there were many, many things that the Nationals could’ve done to make sure that Strasburg would be able to play in the season. Just from the top of my head:
-They could have gone to a six-man rotation.
-They could have limited his pitch counts or his innings per game drastically. Cut him back to 60 pitches a game, or four innings.
-They could have skipped some of his starts.
-They could’ve had him take turns with someone in the pen. The Nats have other pitchers who can start.
Instead, the Nationals did nothing. They stayed the course on a plan made in March, and they stuck to it like it was carved in granite. Stephen Strasburg would reach his inning pitched mark, and then Strasburg would be benched. He wouldn’t be allowed to pitching if the race got close, and he wouldn’t be allowed to pitch in the postseason.
The Nationals reluctance to change directions was one problem. It is at least evidence of rigid thinking. Of inflexibility. Stubbornness.
But the decision itself is not the team’s most egregious mistake. I think the mistake, the real idiocy of this whole awful situation, is not the ‘what’ of it. It’s the how.
I’ve followed this story entirely through various sports news channels, and while I can’t claim that I’ve heard every sound bite that comes from the front office, it has seemed to me that the great majority of conversation that should have occurred between the General Manager and the Ace Pitcher has occurred first through the intermediary of those various sports channels. We have Mike Rizzo coming on the radio saying that Strasburg has an innings pitched limit. Then we get Strasburg talking to a reporter and saying that he hasn’t heard anything about a pitch count. Then we get Rizzo saying to someone that Strasburg doesn’t get to make decisions about the team.
I don’t know why this has been the case. I don’t know why it’s seemed that for the majority of this season, Stephen Strasburg has sounded like the guy who knows the least about what’s going on with Strasburg.
There’s been a strong tone of parentalism coming from the front office; a sense that Mike Rizzo is trying to communicate that he’s the boss. There’s little in the way of flexibility: the purpose of Rizzo’s comments have been to a) communicate that the decision on Strasburg is his decision, exclusively, and b) that he’s made his decision, and will not reconsider it.
To my mind, this attitude is needlessly defensive. And it’s needlessly confrontational. Rizzo has escalated an issue that should’ve been resolved in June into something that will dominate all future discussions about this baseball team, for the rest of this year.
I don’t understand why Rizzo didn’t go to Strasburg first, rather than addressing the situation to the media. I don’t know why it has seemed, repeatedly, that Stephen Strasburg is the last guywho hears about any of this stuff. I don’t know why the team’s decision has been so staggeringly uncompromising about their decision. I don’t understand why no one had the foresight to realize that a young pitcher in his first big-league pennant race might be reluctant to sit on the bench and rah-rah his teammates in the playoffs.
And: I don’t know why this has been allowed to turn into such a needless line-in-the-sand drama, when there were so many avenues available that would’ve allowed for a reasonable compromise.
Because Mike Rizzo and the Nationals are probably not wrong about the central decision. It is very wise to limit Strasburg’s innings. It’s a good plan. They’re absolutely right to be careful with Strasburg.
But Rizzo and the Nationals have made a holy mess of how they’ve tried to implement their plan. They’ve left Strasburg, a central player for this young franchise, deeply upset. At the very least, they’ve jeopardized the chance that Strasburg would sign a long-term deal with the team to buy out some of his free agent years. They’ve reduced the chances that the Nats will advance far in the 2012 playoffs. And if the team doesn’t win the World Series this year, their players and fans will endure an off-season debating the ‘what-if’ of a needless, unnecessary, stupid controversy that the team and the General Manager have fostered all summer long.
* * *
Since I’ve hammered away at Rizzo and the Nationals front office, I want to change directions a bit:
Davey Johnson’s decision to bench Strasburg prior to his last ‘allowed’ start was an act of real, decisive leadership. Instead of letting Strasburg twist in the wind for five days before making one last dead-man-walking start in 2012, Johnson put a stop to the charade. If the higher-ups in management couldn’t bother to make adjustments that would allow Strasburg to participate in the playoffs that he helped the Nationals reach, Davey Johnson wasn’t going to let a visably upset pitcher suffer the indignity of one last pity start.
That was real leadership. I wonder if the upper management noticed.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com