“Never leave town when Strasburg pitches” is the general lesson learned this past weekend. If you do, be ready to return to 100s of blog postings, rants, old-school comments from Ron Dibble, and other opinions. Its official today, Strasburg heads to the DL with a strained flexor tendon. The umpire of the game says he heard an audible pop and Strasburg really looked like he was in some serious discomfort. One MRI inconclusive, so now they’re going with a reactive-fluid injection to more clearly see the damage.
All I can say is, the two words “Tommy John” seem to be in play here.
If there is a silver lining, it may be one of the following observations:
– If the nats shut him down for the rest of the year (and honestly, they really should at this point), he’s still gotten in enough innings to show some progress for the year (55 in the minors, 68 in the majors). Certainly he did not hit the team goal of 150 combined innings … but then again 150 would put him into “Verducci Effect” territory.
– This move easily allows us to bring up Jordan Zimmermann, who has been just killing minor league hitters during his extended rehab, without having to sit one of our established starters (though, I still maintain that Stammen was unfairly demoted from the rotation; look at his advanced stats on fangraphs and you’ll see he’s basically our 2nd best starter behind Strasburg).
We’re moving forward with a rotation of LHernandez, Olsen, Lannan, Marquis, and Zimmermann for now. Detwiler seems done for the year. I can see Olsen possibly getting dumped (and saving a few $100k starts) to make room for Maya in a couple weeks. Wang continues to be MIA.