Thoughts on Strasmas, Safeco Field, and little league pitch count limits.
On Strasmas: Well, today is the big day. June 9, 2010 — the day I penned this — seems a distant memory. Call me a cynic, call me a pessimist, call me a hater: I’m dreading tonight. I just can’t shake the feeling that we’ve seen the best Strasburg is ever going to give us, and all that the future holds is the sad disappointment of a could-have-been career. I hope I’m wrong, but if you offered me 14-10 with a 3.6 ERA next year, I’d take it without thinking.
On Safeco field: I was in Seattle this past week for a conference, and got to Safeco on Thursday night. Wildly unimpressed. I haven’t been to some of the other new parks (notably Yankee and Citi up in in NY), but Safeco seemed to me the pinnacle of anti-traditionalism. You almost don’t even feel like you’re at a baseball game. There’s just too much going on around the park that has little to do with what’s happening on the field. Better than average food, yes. Tons of amenities, yes. But does anyone there know what inning it is? Or even care?
The trend toward retro and fan-friendly stadiums that Camden set off in the 90’s was a godsend. But it’s gone too far.
On Little League Pitch Count Limits: So Little League rules now put serious pitch count limitations on pitchers. Unlike the rules in place when I was a kid — which only limited how many days rest you needed between starts and how many innings you could go in a game — these rules have a significant effect on in-game strategy, and potentially on the development of players. I understand their necessity from a safety point of view, but I am concerned about the strategy issues. First, it encourages opposing teams to take lots of pitches against strong pitchers. Facing a tough pitcher, I don’t think it could possibly be correct to not have every batter taking a strike during each at-bat, nor would it be correct to ever give someone the green light, 3-0. Of even more concern is batter behavior as the pitch count limit approaches later in the game. The rule states that a pitcher must come out after he finishes facing the batter to whom he throws his 85th pitch. If it’s the 5th inning of a 6 inning little league game and you’re facing some flamethrower who has completely mowed you down all night but now has a pitch count of 76, it is probably the correct strategy for all of your batters to take two strikes. That would guarantee you, at a minimum, a new pitcher in the 6th, and could very well force a pitching change in the 5th. I’m not crazy about these sorts of tactics coming into play in baseball. They seem like the kind of incentives that make the game less fun. There are certainly equivalents in other sports — most notably driving to the hoop against players in foul trouble in basketball — but this seems different.
The second issues is more interesting, and serves just as a question: will the pitch counts (and perhaps offensive strategy in light of them) condition the next generation of pitchers to be more accurate? I have no idea, but it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t have some sort of marginal effect.
Not sure where the Strasburg pessimism is coming from. There’s a good chance that (a) he never quite develops everything it’s currently possible for him to develop and (b) that he never fully comes back from surgery. But there’s _always_ been a good chance that he wouldn’t pan out. There’s a good chance Bryce Harper and Mike Trout and Eric Hosmer won’t pan out, too–it doesn’t make them any less exciting, and even a decent chance that Strasburg could be a generational talent makes him one of the most valuable players in baseball right now.
Is it just easier for me to think happy thoughts about Strasburg because I’m not a Nats fan?
Nate:
I’m definitely going on instinct/irrationality/pessimism here. While it’s true that Strasburg was always highly unlikely to become Roger Clemens and probably not a favorite to have a career better than Doc Gooden, there was sense in DC last June (both before and after that first start) that Strasburg was going to turn the franchise around and generate the kind of interest that was going to blow up baseball here in a way that no one alive could remember. I don’t think you can oversell the excitement here the week after that first start; I’ve only lived down here for five years, but I’d never seen anything that indicated a team could steal the headlines from the Redskins prior to that Strasburg start. Was some of the hype inflated? Sure. But the feeling was real.
Of course, the asterisk that had always been attached to the hype was the “if he stays healthy” tag. I’m not saying that he can’t come back from Tommy John surgery and have a great career; it’s certainly possible. But many, many people in DC thought that an injury was inevitable down the road, and that all we could hope for was to get as much out of him as possible before the inevitable struck. He had all the signs: the 100mph heater, the inverted “W” delivery, the minor college injuries and “soreness,” etc. In effect, the ghost of Mark Prior was already in people’s minds. And then it happened just like that.
So I guess the answer is this: like you say, most top prospects aren’t a favorite to pan out. Flamethrowers hoping to become Clemens or Ryan have the deck completely stacked against them regarding longevity. But Strasburg showed a flash of a possibility of absolutely transforming a franchise and a city’s relationship to a team. Everything he was hyped to be, he delivered last June. But now he’s been shown not-invincible, and is talking about things like “transforming his game” to rely less on his fastball. The euphoria of June 2010 is unlikely to come back.
So maybe the veil has just been lifted, and Strasburg’s 5% chance of being a transformational player is now seen for what it is, having never changed. But to a man, last summer it felt like we had lucked our way into Larry Bird (or, for your own peace of mind, Isaih Thomas).
matt