Ow, my arm... I think it's broken

Since my move south to Virginia three years ago, the hard-luck Washington Nationals have become my adopted home baseball team. I even worked for them during the summer of 2008, and I've still got plenty of friends in their front office. So it was hard for me to read the news today that their star rookie pitcher, Stephen Strasburg, is likely to need Tommy John surgery to repair a torn ligament in his pitching arm.

That means only 12 games into his major league career, Strasburg, 22, is facing a 12-to-18-month recovery from the operation and perhaps another season to recover his form. Strasburg, the No. 1 pick in the 2009 draft, seemed headed for superstardom and now looks like a lot of young pitchers whose arms fail suddenly.

It's easy for many to draw a comparison between Stephen Strasburg and former Cubs pitcher Mark Prior, who entered the league in 2002 to equally hyperbolic praise after a similarly dominating collegiate career. Both will be viewed as cautionary tales of star pitchers asked by their teams to do too much, too soon.

But Strasburg's case is more troubling because the Nationals really did do everything right. After starting the season in the minor leagues, Strasburg made 11 starts for the Nationals before injuring his arm in the 12th. In those 11 starts, he never once threw 100 pitches, and averaged only 92.5, as well as being scratched from one start for precautionary reasons--a difficult decision for his team to make, given that attendance doubled in games he was scheduled to pitch.

Prior, on the other hand, is a case study in pitcher abuse. He made 19 starts as a 21-year old rookie in 2002, throwing an average of 106.5 pitches (15 percent more on average than Strasburg) and exceeding 115 pitches four times. The next year, new manager Dusty Baker allowed Prior to average a staggering 113.4 pitches over 30 starts, as well as making 3 more starts averaging 122.7 pitches in that year's playoffs. It was to nobody's surprise when Prior's clear overuse caught up with him, effectively ending his career after those two seasons.

For both pitchers, though, it is likely that the damage was done long before the pitchers ever made it to the professional level. While Little League Baseball places strict pitch limits on its players, high school and college coaches are rarely incentivized to look out for their young players' best interests; rather, it is to their benefit to ride unusually talented players as far as they will take them. In that regard, hall-of-fame outfielder Tony Gwynn, Strasburg's college coach at San Diego State, must shoulder some of the blame here. Even before the recent diagnosis of a torn ligament, Strasburg admitted to having pitched through similar pain throughout his collegiate career. If Gwynn knew this, and ignored it, the Nationals should be furious with him.

Either way, the lesson for big league ballclubs is, as always, "buyer beware". By the time a pitcher reaches the age of 21, it is increasingly likely that at least one coach along the way has abused his arm with little regard for his long-term health. The only way the Nationals could have known exactly how much abuse Strasburg's arm had taken was by asking him before they signed him--and with $15 million on the line, I sincerely doubt that they would have heard the whole truth at the negotiating table.

Hopefully Strasburg will beat the odds and ultimately recover to become the pitcher the Nationals hoped he would be when they signed him; if not, it's probably not the Nationals who will be to blame.

[New York Times]