TUESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2010


KLMNO BASEBALL


EZ SU


D5


burg was asked about the claims that his mechanics were faulty, and about the “inverted W” spe- cifically. “I really don’t know what an


inverted W is,” he answered. “I know there’s a lot of pitchers in history who don’t have perfect mechanics, and end up pitching 20-plus years.” When the studio analysts pro-


duced a photo of Strasburg show- ing the inverted W, Strasburg said, “Well, you know, that’s the way I’ve been throwingmy whole life, and I haven’t had any inju- ries.”


Into the shadows The sports world is quick to


The shy and untrusting Stephen Strasburg began to show more of his personality to teammates as theNationals’ season wore on.


and almost no group interviews except those that followed each of his starts — served to set him apart from his teammates, any of whomcan be approached at their lockers at any time. When the team decided to put


Strasburg on the disabled list in July following a minor bout of shoulder stiffness, Manager Jim Riggleman got involved in order to convince him to talk to the media. “ThePRguys toldmehe wasn’t


comfortable talking to the me- dia,” Riggleman said. “So I had a talk with him. I said: ‘Look, you have to do this. . . . I don’t want to say how your arm feels. I might say something wrong. You know how you feel. You’ve just got to be more open to talking to the me- dia. They’re going to be an ally for you. They’re not out to get you.’ ” Heavily coached on speaking


to the media, Strasburg typically stayed on script, shifting the fo- cus from himself to the team, and beginning many answers with some version of, “Definitely gotta go out there and . . .”His answers rarely revealed much, explicitly or implicitly, about himself. There was one notable excep-


tion. Late at night on Aug. 15, following Strasburg’s start against the Arizona Diamond- backs, the media pack was back- ing away from his locker. He had just finished answering a ques- tion about Bryce Harper, the 17- year-old Las Vegas native whom the Nationals had taken with the first overall draft pick in June, and who, at that point, had about 48 hours to come to a contract agreement with theNationals be- fore they lost his rights. “I don’t have any advice for


PHOTOS BY JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST


“That’s the tragedy of the whole thing,”Nationals pitcher DrewStoren said of Stephen Strasburg’s injury. “Things were starting to settle down for him.He was getting comfortable in his own skin.”


The day that paused Strasburg’s career


strasburg from D1 Strasburg was still in his street


clothes, the sunglasses removed, when he plopped down on a couch in the center of the club- house, next to outfielderMichael Morse. Each held an iPhone.They tapped away at the screens furi- ously — playing each other in a video fishing game, the outcome of which was always the same. “I never once beat him,”Morse


said later. “Absolutely not. There was no way.” When it was almost time to go


out to the bullpen to begin warm- ing up, SteveMcCatty, theNation- als’ grizzled pitching coach, be- gan ribbing Strasburg about the notoriously obnoxious Phillies fans, who would line the bullpen on two sides, separated only by a railing and a distance of about 15 feet,andundoubtedlygive the kid an earful. “I was like: ‘Hey, big boy, wait


until you get out there.Wait until they slice-n-dice you. We’ll see how tough you are,’ ” McCatty recalled. As Strasburg climbed the bull-


pen mound and began throwing lightly, the crowds pressed in around him, three-deep in some areas — but it was eerily quiet. Most of the fans held cameras or camera phones up to their faces, too engrossed to perform their duties as intimidators. The only distraction came when a security guard, stationed in a roped-off section directly behind Stras- burg, pulled out his own phone and began taking pictures, and catcher Ivan Rodriguez waved him away. “Nobody said anything,” Mc-


Catty said. “It was like they really thought they were seeing history.” A fewhours later, shortly after


9:30 p.m., it was all over: Stras- burg’s night and, as it turned out, his season. A good chunk of the Nationals’ hopes for 2011. And


Final installment of series


Baseball writer Dave Sheinin has been chronicling the journey of Stephen Strasburg, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2009 draft, from his promising debut in the minor leagues through his first major league performances for the Nationals.


the notion, unfounded and naïve as it was, that Strasburg was somehow indestructible, some- how different than all the other phenomswhohave broken down. Desmond had been right.


Strasburg was locked in that night in Philadelphia, delivering, up until the fateful bottom of the fifth inning,whatwasperhapshis most dominating performance since his unforgettable June 8 debut, when he electrified Na- tionals Park by striking out 14 Pittsburgh Pirates. Andthe Phillies’ fans lining the


bullpen that night had been cor- rect, too. They saw history. They saw the most talented, most hyped, most famous pitching phenom in years throw the final pitch of his rookie season. They saw him grab his arm after deliv- ering an unremarkable change- up, his 53rd pitch of the game, then grimace and gesture to the dugout for help. They saw him blow out his $15.1 million elbow.


Emerging fromhis shell Ten days before the fateful


night in Philadelphia, on Aug. 11, a handful of teammates took DrewStoren, theNationals’ rook- ie closer, out to a sushi restaurant in Alexandria after the game to celebrate his 23rd birthday. Sto- ren invited Strasburg, as well, telling him to bring his wife, Rachel. But no one figured they would show up. Suddenly, from their table in


the front window, the players saw the Strasburgs walking toward the restaurant. The birthday boy seemed blown away. “I said to the other guys: ‘Stras is here! Sweet!’ It was just pretty


cool,” Storen said. “It meant a lot to me, and the other guys there. Honestly, it’s a pain for him to go out — he’s going to get bothered [by fans and gawkers] anywhere he goes. Iknowit’s not something he enjoys.” By late summer, in fact, Stras-


burg, shy and untrusting by na- ture, was beginning to feel more comfortable in the Nationals’ clubhouse. “With all the attention on him,


he doesn’t really know who to trust, who to joke around with. But as time went on he figured out we’re all on his side, and he opened up a little more,” Nation- als pitcher Craig Stammen said. “He was starting to figure out who he really is as a person.” Storen added: “That’s the trag-


edy of the whole thing. Things were starting to settle down for him. He was getting comfortable in his own skin. There wasn’t as much hoopla around him. And then he blows out the elbow.” Outside of winning games and


executing pitches, nothing drove Strasburg more than the effort to be unnoticed and unspecial. It was one of the primary missions of his rookie season. “He was incredibly concerned


about the perception [of him] by his teammates,” one Nationals official said. “It was important for him not to be seen as someone with any sort of entitlement whatsoever.” At times, that effort created


apparent contradictions. He dis- dained the media, chafing atwhat he viewed as an unwarranted obsession with him. But the team’s media policy for Stras- burg, which he endorsed—virtu- ally no one-on-one interviews,


him,” said Strasburg, who, like Harper, is a client of agent Scott Boras. “It’s his decision.” As the media backed away, thinking Strasburg was finished, he suddenly resumed his answer. “If he doesn’twantto play here,


then we don’t want him,” Stras- burg blurted. “That’s the bottom line.” That he would say such a thing


seemed strange, given the fact that, 12 months earlier, Strasburg himself was in practically the exactsamecircumstance:coming down to the wire on signing day as the No. 1 overall pick of the draft. Equally strange was the way he said it: as if he had been awaiting an opening in which to trumpet the fact that his loyalties are with the Nationals now, not Team Boras. The quote caused a minor up-


roar when it hit the Internet and the morning papers, but in the Nationals’ clubhouse, it had the desired effect. “That was the first time you


guys [in the media] saw the real Stephen,” Storen said. “That wasn’t scripted. That was him. And I can tell you, it went over real big in here.Huge.There were a lot of guys who, the next day, were going [with a fist pump], ‘Yeah!’ ”


The grieving process OnMonday, Aug. 23, Strasburg


was called into Riggleman’s office at Nationals Park. Inside sat the Nationals’ manager, General Manager Mike Rizzo and McCat- ty. An MRI exam of Strasburg’s elbow, taken the day before, had shown what appeared to be a significant tear of his ulnar collat- eral ligament. “That was the day, that Mon-


day, when we went through our seven stages of grief,” then team president Stan Kasten said.


Behind the closed door, Stras-


burg would get terrible news: He would almost certainly need re- constructive surgery. He would miss the rest of the 2010 season and most if not all of 2011. “Very upset. Distraught,” Rig-


gleman recalled, when asked Strasburg’s reaction. “He was in- consolable for an hour or two there.” The Nationals decided not to


reveal the tear, or the likely sur- gery, until they could schedule a more precise “wet” MRI—which three days later, on Thursday morning, confirmed the tear and the need for surgery. That same afternoon, the Na-


tionals held a full bells-and-whis- tles news conference to introduce Harper, with whom they had reached an agreement minutes before the signing deadline—just as they had a year earlier with Strasburg. Team officials decided to wait


until Friday to announce the con- firmation of Strasburg’s torn liga- ment and pending surgery, want- ing to give Harper an undiluted welcome. But the overlapping of the two cathartic events, Stras- burg’s injury andHarper’s unveil- ing, made for some uneasy inter- nal negotiations within each member of the braintrust. “I think we all felt a little bad


about being so excited about Bryce, when Stephen was over there suffering,” Riggleman said. “This press conference was going out all over the country. I know I tried to downplay my excite- ment.” That week, and the first few


that followed, was a time of soul- searching for the Nationals, with everyone questioning themselves as to whether they could have done something different to pre- vent Strasburg’s blowout, but in- evitably reaching the conclusion that they couldn’t have. “I feel terrible,” McCatty said


recently. “I sit there all the time and beatmyself up. But he’s going to throw it the way he throws it, and he doesn’t hold anything back. I wish to God it hadn’t happened. It happened while I was pitching coach. It happened onmy watch. I’mgoing to have to live with that. But I honestlydon’t think there was anything I could have done to stop it from happen- ing.”


Some self-proclaimed experts


on pitching mechanics focused on Strasburg’s delivery, with one popular theory holding that a certain trait within it—called the “inverted W,” for the formation hisarmsmadejust before deliver- ing a pitch—was a red flag. Boras, however, said Stras-


burg’s delivery had been “biomet- rically assayed” prior to his sign- ing with the Nationals, and had been given a thumbs-up. Since arriving in Washington,


Strasburg has never discussed his pitching mechanics in depth. But an interview he did on the set of ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight” on April 22, when he was pitching for Class AA Harrisburg, con- tained a revealingmoment.Stras-


forget you when you are gone. In Washington, folks have


moved on to the travails of Dono- vanMcNabb and the Redskins. The hard-core Nationals fans


are asking whether second base- man Danny Espinosa is for real, and whether Cuban right-hander YunieskyMaya — who now occu- pies the locker that was once Strasburg’s — is a legitimate ma- jor league pitcher. In other corners of the baseball


world, Cincinnati’s Aroldis Chap- man, with his legendary 104-mph fastball, is the captivating phe- nom of the moment. Strasburg, back home in San


Diego following his surgery, went more than a month without speaking publicly, surfacing last week on a conference call with the media, sounding upbeat and uncharacteristically crowing about how he “stirred up” the baseball world during his 21/2 months inWashington. The ones who still care about


Strasburg, who still think about big number 37 and can still feel the way the stadium hummed and buzzed every five days, have their memories. Mark Lerner is one of them.


The Nationals’ principal owner figures he has watched the video of Strasburg’s dazzling June 8 debut a dozen times. “Any time I get depressed,”


Lerner said, “I just put it on and watch.” McCatty has watched it, too,


but the experience was not so therapeutic. “It was amazing. It was elec-


tric,” he said. “But looking back, I sort of wish he hadn’t struck out 14 guys. It was like, ‘Now, people are going to remember that.’ It set a high bar that really wasn’t fair to him.” The Nationals miss their ace,


as much for the buzz he brought as for the wins. “There was a different intensi-


ty in the stadium whenever he pitched,” Morse said. “National TV. Packed houses. As position players, after he went down, we were like, ‘We’ve got to keep this intensity going.’ But youknow, it’s a long season.” Strasburg gained so much in


2010 — the professional experi- ence, the comfort of fitting into his surroundings—but lostmuch more. Same goes for the Nation- als, who were drawing roughly 12,000 more fanswhenever Stras- burg started at home. “It was like getting the appetiz-


er,” Storen said, “but not being allowed to eat the entrée.” Even though everyone recog-


nized, or should have, the possi- bility of an arm breakdown, the intoxicating atmosphere that grew around the phenom, with his preternatural brilliance, somehow created the false notion that Strasburgwouldbe different. He’ll be back, of course, per-


haps in September 2011, perhaps in April 2012.He’ll return scarred but smarter, like all of those swept up by his story. But as for The Phenom — that


awe-inspiring mixture of tangi- ble, youthful brilliance andmyth- ological possibility — he’s gone forever.


sheinind@washpost.com


“It happened onmy watch. I’m going to have to live with that,” SteveMcCatty, left, said.


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