Stephen Strasburg Won’t Make Any More Starts This Season

↵Just one problem with that rationale:

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Many will find it tough to believe that Boras doesn’t have a word in anything, let alone the future of a prized client in a playoff race, but he did make one outstanding point -- Mike Rizzo wouldn’t care what he had to say. The Nationals GM isn’t exactly the most easy-going of guys.

The Nationals decided to shut down Strasburg and put the long-term health of the pitcher over the short-term gains of having their ace in a playoff race. The Nationals did, not Scott Boras.

Via Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post:

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“If you’re not there 100 percent mentally -- I mean, he’s a gifted athlete. His velocity could still be there,” Johnson said, according to the Washington Post. “I don’t see the crispness. I don’t see the ball jumping out of his hand. It’s more, I’m a firm believer this game is 90-95 percent mental. He’s only human. I don’t know how anybody can be totally concentrating on the job at hand and media hype to this thing. I think we would be risking more sending him back out.”

Strasburg allowed two home runs in just three innings on Friday, giving up five hits with two walks. He finishes the season with a 3.16 ERA and 197 strikeouts in 159 ⅓ innings.

Johnson apparently changed his mind after sleeping on it:

But after this announcement, that matchup won’t happen. There’s apparently nothing physically wrong with Strasburg:

So the biggest takeaway from a wild, 9-7 loss proved to be the manner in which Strasburg’s 2012 D.C. finale played out and the manner in which the right-hander, his manager and others tried to explain what exactly happened.

“To be honest with you, I think he was thinking too much about the decision of what we were going to shut him down,” Davey Johnson said. “And he kind wore it like it. … I think he wasn’t focused as much on the game as he was on the impending shutdown. Just he way I read it.”Strasburg denied it affected him, saying he just had a bad outing, but this raises the question: with so few innings thrown by him Friday, could he get another start after the 12th?

Strasburg has been slated to make his final start of the season Wednesday in New York. Would Friday’s abbreviated outing make the Nationals reconsider the plan at all?

“It might,” Johnson said in highly cryptic fashion.Stay tuned.

Source:

↵With Stephen Strasburg approaching his innings limit for the year, Nationals personnel announced plans Tuesday to shut down the star pitcher for the remainder of the regular season and playoffs by removing several tendons from his right arm.

The innings-limit is something of a tired story -- you’d better believe it is in the Washington, D.C. area -- but it’s at least a nuanced story. There’s risk, and there’s reward. The lines between both are fuzzy, and it’s the start of a multifaceted debate on what sports franchises and their fans should value. The glory of a single championship season, risks be damned? Or the extended success of a franchise thinking long-term? Then you get into the physical arguments. How much would the extra innings hurt Strasburg? How sure can we be? What’s the cost/benefit to having Strasburg for an extra season or two compared to a championship?

Et cetera. The story is kind of tired, but at least you can see why it riles people up in the first place. It’s fascinating in limited doses. The nuance, people. Think of the nuance.

Nationals GM Mike Rizzo, though, gives us our first glimpse at how Strasburg feels. From 106.7 The Fan in DC, by way of Sports Radio Interviews:

“Well Stephen Strasburg is an ultra competitor. He’s not happy with the decision. He thinks he can continue to contribute to the ball club and that type of thing. He expressed his opposition to it and we just tried to explain to him what our thinking was and gave him our rationale and at the end of the day I think he is accepting of our decision. He disagrees with it.”

“The protocol called for this range of innings, and we would then proceed with an increased amount of innings in 2013,” (Boras) continued. “Everyone had notice of this. Everyone was given this. And to violate the protocol is something that ranges — in the opinion of medical experts — into risk factors....I pay very close attention to protocols given by physicians, particularly for players who have had operative procedures early in their career.“Boras mentioned legal ramifications, which sent people a-scurrying to conclusions. But he was likely talking about the insurance aspect, which the Post digs into later:

Boras had insisted the insurance policy for Strasburg’s contract could be voided if he pitches against medical advice and injured himself. Representatives from multiple specialty insurance companies backed the claim.

“Absolutely, it does” sound feasible, said Colin Fairlie, a vice president at Sutton Special Risk. “And frankly, I wouldn’t think that that would happen very often. What do you have a medical staff for if you’re not going to depend on their advice?It’s a tangled web without any easy answers, and while the insurance isn’t the main (or even a primary) factor in the decision, it’s still a multi-million-dollar factor.

Prior to that meeting, the club purposely gave the pitcher vague information about the specifics of his shutdown date (other than the fact that they would be shutting him down at some point), in order to keep his mind off the amount of innings he had left in his season.

While Strasburg will accept the decision, he has been fairly vocal in his desire to keep playing.

Strasburg, who is playing in his first full season following Tommy John surgery, is 15-6 on the season with a 2.94 ERA and 195 strikeouts in 156 1/3 innings. The nine strikeouts on Sunday gave Strasburg 311 strikeouts in his MLB career, which began in 2010.

For more on the Nationals, please visit Federal Baseball and SB Nation DC.

How close? Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post quotes manager Davey Johnson:

With September arriving this weekend and Strasburg sitting at 150 1/3 innings, the Nationals ace’s season will end within a handful of starts. Johnson said he and the Nationals have “a pretty firm plan” in place for Strasburg’s season to end.

“He’s probably got two or three,” Johnson said. “I said something to him on the plane last night – ‘You got a few more to go.’ So he doesn’t think going out there thinking that, ‘This may be my last one.’ And no, I’m not going to drag it out and give him seven days between starts, either.”

What does Bill James think? Pretty much what most of the non-frothing crowd thinks: He probably would have done it differently, but he understands why it’s being done.

If it was me, I’d err on the side of caution. I don’t know that I would have done it exactly the way the Nationals did. Maybe I would have limited him to 80 pitches a start for the first half of the year, and then cut him loose late in the year, rather than the other way. But I think I would have erred on the side of caution, rather than risking another injury.There’s also a bit about some kid getting hosed by his dorm situation at a state school, but let’s stick with Strasburg. As more and more people get used to the ideas that, no, the Nationals aren’t messing around with the innings limit, and, yes, they’ll even keep him out of the playoffs, this is probably going to be the majority view.

So let’s not jump to conclusions. Even when an authority like Dr. James Andrews speaks:

A. I think it’s a bit presumptuous to assume how convincing Nats fans will find the thoughts of Dr. James Andrews.

A couple of weeks ago, William Ladson tweeted the Nationals were likely to skip two or three of Strasburg’s starts toward the end of the year. Via the Associated Press, manager Davey Johnson confirmed that initial report:

“I think it came out that with the off days we’d need another starter for I think two starts,” Johnson said after talking with general manager Mike Rizzo. “I think two starts, might have been three.“The story has drawn national attention -- pun not intended, but I’m keeping it in and pointing it out -- because the Nationals have the best record in baseball and are likely to go to the playoffs, but they’ll be without Strasburg, who has thrown 145 innings this season with a 2.85 ERA.

That’s just how special Strasburg’s arm is, though. His career has the potential to be franchise-changing and historic, if he can just stay healthy. That last bit is the key here.

Nate Silver and Will Carroll wrote of the injury nexus for pitchers back in 2003 at Baseball Prospectus. In essence, the strain that the pitching motion puts on an arm is at its greatest when a pitcher is very young. The Red Sox and Rays were both careful with their young arms, despite both being in that (relative) safe zone within the injury nexus. What the Nationals are doing is more extreme, but it’s because they are in a more extreme circumstance. From the article:

This isn’t going over very well in the Nats’ clubhouse. Adam Kilgore of the Washington Post spoke to some Nats players; here’s one typical reaction:

The Nats have the best record in the major leagues and look postseason-bound, barring a total collapse in September. Here’s why, writes Kilgore, the Nats could be all right even without Strasburg:

From the intrepid William Ladson, we have some indication about how much time Strasburg will miss because of a team-imposed innings limit:

I’m wondering if the Nationals had to do it all over again, they would have had Strasburg start the season late rather than end it early. Probably. Well ... shoot.

Did I mention it’s long? I will wait.

Cool, thanks.