Strasburg

You don't often watch a guy play for years wondering if he will ever get back to where he started. After surgery, injuries, adjustments, melt-downs and growing up, Stephen Strasburg finally looks like the pitcher of his June 8, 2010, debut -- a night of 14 strikeouts, total dominance, boundless expectations. This season he's now 3-0, 2.17 ERA, and most notably, he doesn't seem to get rattled by a few bad pitches or defensive miscues behind him. And it is said that once or twice in the dugout he has smiled.

Sally and I went out to Nats park Sunday, on a glorious baseball afternoon, and watched Strasburg carve up the Twins. Early on he gave up a run on few hits but didn't seem troubled and continued to dominate into the 8th. Twins starter Tyler Duffey, just called up from the minors, was also holding the Nats to 1 run until Matt den Dekker drilled a line drive into his right arm in the 5th.  At the time we couldn’t see where the ball hit, even with a good view from just behind third; we only heard the sickening “whack,” Sally’s maternal instincts flared, and we were relieved to see Duffey still standing. He came out of the game to polite applause from the ever-polite Nats crowd and is, apparently, not seriously injured.

About that view of ours. There is no substitute for going to the park to watch a ball game, but it’s far easier to appreciate the black-magic aerodynamics of baseballs swooping and gyrating toward home plate when sitting in the family room, with HDTV, replays and commentary on just where the pitcher is gripping the seams and flipping his wrist and releasing the ball and doing the tango or whatever it is that guys like Strasburg do to make baseballs come alive. From those seats behind 3rd, we knew all that was happening but could only really see the secondary effects – Twins batters swinging, flailing, stumbling, standing up, sitting down, 10 strikeouts and a lot of hapless contact until, well, pitch #114, with one out in the 8th, Strasburg tired but feeling the love of 35,000 fans. Twins second baseman Brian Dozier hit a three-run home run.

So that was a fine afternoon of baseball. Strasburg left to warm applause, Dusty Baker perhaps made a mental note to keep Strasburg's pitch count a little lower next time, and a sunny stadium honored an ace finally living up to his early promise, even if he went one batter too far.  And did I mention the ice cream? The lines were long at the gelato cart just inside the third-base gate, but the mango and raspberry was well worth it, and if dogmatic purists object that mango gelato has no place in a ball park, there’s a Breyers stand nearby with some terrific soft-serve. If a 4-1 Twins victory was not how we hoped the afternoon would end, we really had little genuine basis for complaint.

Thing was, that was not how the afternoon ended.  It went on and on and on for 16 innings of lunacy, finally ending three hours later in a 6-5 Nats win that we saw from our family room as I was burning salmon on the grill. (Multi-tasking is not really my thing.)  It was the longest regular-season game in Nats history, comparable only to the 2014 playoff game when we shivered through 18 innings watching Yusmeiro Petit of the Giants sit down the Nats scoreless in extra inning after extra inning. This time Petit, now of the Nats, sat down the Twins scoreless in inning after inning, and that coincidence was far from the strangest thing about the game. But Boswell relates it all better than I.

So, Strasburg. He’s now where we though he’d be on that night in 2010. Problem is that at the time, he had a stellar Nats career ahead of him, and now he’s in the last year of his contract, likely headed elsewhere next year. (Please God, not the Mets.) But that’s OK. He’s shown admirable resilience and deserves to enjoy his success (even if he never seems to) and anyway, next season is next season. We have a great summer ahead.

And for a fabulous post-script: Strasburg signs contract extension with the Nats.