OPINION:
BALTIMORE — Stephen Strasburg stood at his locker Monday afternoon in the visitor’s clubhouse at Camden Yards and spoke about the news that nearly triggered the local Emergency Broadcast System — he was going on the disabled list for a sore right elbow.
“Pretty much ever since the All-Star break I think I was losing flexibility and never getting it back,” Strasburg said.
A few minutes later, MLB network analyst Jim Kaat walked through the clubhouse. I was thinking he might stop by Strasburg’s locker and say hello, or maybe go the other way and deliver an “I told you so.”
After all, it was Kaat, the 25-year veteran major league pitcher who broke in with the Washington Senators in 1959, who wrote a public letter addressed to Strasburg in 2012 that questioned the Nationals’ shutdown of the hurler and called him out for not fighting harder to pitch the rest of the 2012 season and into the team’s postseason.
“If my GM told me in September of 1965 (when his Minnesota Twins won the American League pennant) that he was going to shut me down and not allow me a chance to pitch in the World Series, knowing my stubborn Dutch nature, he would have had quite an argument on his hands,” Kaat wrote.
So I thought maybe they had become pen pals or something since then. After all, you wrote a letter to the guy, and now here he was, just minutes after he told reporters that the elbow he was shut down to protect following Tommy John surgery was sore. A few sage words, perhaps?
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Turns out that Kaat has never spoken to Strasburg since he wrote that public letter that seemed to question Strasburg’s motives when he wrote, “If you can imagine what it would feel like to ride down Pennsylvania Avenue in a victory parade with your teammates and wave to the White House and hundreds of thousands of Nationals fans and feel that feeling … you would give a lot of thought to whether it was right or wrong not to pitch anymore this season.”
A letter like that would seem to be worth a conversation somewhere along the way.
“I’ve seen him in the clubhouse, but it is so difficult in these times, unless you follow a team on a daily basis, to get much interaction other than with the manager and some of the coaches,” Kaat said following the telecast of Monday night’s Orioles’ 4-3 win over the Nationals. “Players are in their lounge, understandably so, or taking part in batting practice or something else I know some of them and interact with some of them, but I never had much time to have any one on one time with Stephen.”
Fair or not, Kaat’s letter will be resurrected, along with the long list of other criticisms against Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo, for the team’s decision to limit Strasburg’s innings while the team was on its way to winning the 2012 National League East title if this latest Strasburg disabled list stay turns out to be something far more serious. The Nationals called it a precautionary measure. “We’ve been monitoring it for a while, and we felt like the prudent thing to do — like we always have with our pitchers — was to give him this reset,” Rizzo said. “I think if we were later in the season and we had to have him pitch, he could pitch for us, and he would pitch for us.”
But this isn’t a sore back or sore neck. This pain is at ground zero — the elbow with the transplanted tendon to replace the torn ligament Strasburg suffered in 2010.
Has Kaat changed his mind at all about anything he wrote to Strasburg six years ago?
“I don’t regret anything I wrote or would change anything in it,” Kaat said. “I wrote it to be supportive of him.
“I just felt bad for him at that time,” Kaat said. “If I put myself in that position, knowing what I know now getting to the World Series in 1965 and never getting back until 1982, thinking we would be there many times, I thought if you had that opportunity, you want to take advantage of it.
“I’m more disappointed in management in general and really former players who know better but are victims of the system,” he continued. “They can’t buck the system. I understand. It’s their job. I wouldn’t last 30 days given some of the rules and restrictions today, because given my playing experience, I know better. I know what works and what doesn’t.
“The pitch count and the innings restriction is so bogus,” Kaat said. “You talk to doctors and there is no data to substantiate that it will shorten your career or that it will hurt your arm. You can hurt your arm at any time. It bothers me that they shut pitchers down for any reason.”
The Nationals say they have data — a large volume of it — that supports their Tommy John recovery plan, the same plan that had been put into place the year before for Jordan Zimmermann, who this winter signed a five-year, $110 million contract with the Detroit Tigers and has made 178 starts since his Tommy John surgery (Zimmermann is on the disabled list currently with a sore neck). And the narrative that Strasburg’s absence in the final weeks of 2012 and the postseason cost them the World Series is, as Kaat might say, bogus. In Strasburg’s last five starts before he was shut down, he gave up 13 runs in 26 innings. He had pitched a total of 147 professional innings to that point — 55 in the minors and 92 in the majors. He had pitched more innings in 2012 — nearly 160 innings — than he had in his professional career.
But none of this matters. It doesn’t matter that Kris Medlen, hailed as the anti-Strasburg for the way the Atlanta Braves managed his innings following his Tommy John surgery, had a second elbow surgery two years later. It doesn’t matter that New York Mets starter Matt Harvey, after pitching well into the postseason last year coming off his Tommy John surgery, is out for the year recovering from shoulder surgery.
This is the burden of the Strasburg shutdown that continues to haunt this team — a decision that can never be proven right, no matter what. And any twinge in that right elbow will arm the critics with validation — even though, like Kaat himself said, you can hurt your arm at any time.
Kaat has earned the right to have his opinion on any subject concerning major league pitching. He pitched 25 seasons, 898 games, 625 starts, with five teams, winning 283 games and losing 237 — a remarkable record of durability. He is, by all accounts, a smart and good man.
But it’s a puzzling emotional reaction by a former player to a decision that was made to protect a player. You would think that someone with Kaat’s time in baseball during the evolution of the players union and the change in how players were treated over that time — from 1959 to 1983 — would praise a management decision to protect the future of a player.
“It is a different era,” Kaat said. “We were raised differently. We didn’t have the comfortable contracts they have, and we really wouldn’t think of giving up a start unless we really had an injury where you couldn’t pick up the ball and throw it. You couldn’t afford to or you might not get your starts again. That’s the way we were trained. They are trained differently today. It’s easy for us to say what I would do in today’s game but we don’t know that because we played in a different era.”
Stephen Strasburg has earned $25 million in 155 starts to date over his seven year major league career. In May he signed a seven-year, $175 million contract extension.
Kaat earned a little more than $1 million over his entire 25-year career, with $200,000 the highest payday in his final season.
He was right about one thing: It was easy for him to say what he would have done in that letter.
Maybe someday he’ll share those thoughts with Strasburg in person.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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