Of course, it is neither here nor there what he is like – I wasn’t inviting him to dinner anyway. I am just saying it in the context of why would anyone be suprised he is pretending the obvious is not true

I can believe, simultaneously, that he’s a very good GM and that he was wrong to handle Strassburg in the way that he did.

Most old timers will tell you that today’s pitchers throw to little not to much.

And what about those old timers who blew out their arms from pitching too much and had their careers end? What would they say?

Stories stay alive when they have legs. Conflicting reports from doctors gave it legs. Strasburg being against the move gave it legs. Nat’s losing in the first round gave it legs. And guess what? Rizzo contorting logic by pretending no one in DC was against the move just gave it more legs.

To put it more sympathetically, would you rather have the days when no one cared what the Nats did?

Are a couple of poor starts indication of Stras running out of gas?

Does his K-rate and overall performance during the final month+ offset what was only a couple of bad starts, which every pitcher is prone to have at times?

Was the increasing chatter about the looming shutdown a distraction that might have affected his performance toward the end?

It’s pretty easy to spin this stuff in whichever direction fits your viewpoint.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/WAS/WAS201209020.shtml

He was fine. He was great. It rained, and he came back out after a rain delay.

Or, perhaps, they are better with him than without him. And having their best pitcher, would have had repercussions beyond the game he might have started.

For 2012, the naysayers were right, and Rizzo was wrong. In the short term, there’s no other conclusion. To say otherwise makes one an apologist.

I understood the caution with Strasburg, and thought it was wise to avoid ramping up his workload too dramatically in his first post-TJ season. But I still think they could have (and should have) been a little more creative with how they kept the workload in check. I know baseball is a routine-oriented sport (pitchers especially) and you don’t want to jerk with things too much. But the long baseball season provides flexibility to adjust things here & there (based on the schedule, days off, etc.), so why not skip an occassional start, or toss in an extra day of rest between starts here & there, so that utlimately he could have made his final few starts in the postseason rather than August?

So while I agreed with the overall idea of being cautious with the workload, I thought their unwillingness to stray from a completely normal, rigid routine was where they got too conservative. And while we’ll never know how Stras’ presence might have changed their 2012 postseason results, it certainly couldn’t have hurt having him take the ball in Game 2 trying to take a commanding 2-0 lead in the best-of-5 NLDS.

But it’s a new year and hopefully this story fades and Stras stays (mostly) healthy from here on out. The whole thing will likely be something we can all only speculate about, wondering what might have been, but with no definitive right or wrong answer…. unless, god forbid, he experiences some type of significant arm injury during spring or early into 2013, cuz then he’s hurt again and holding him back from last year’s postseason would basically have been all for nothin.