Of course, it’s not going to be in the majors — the Nationals have money to save!
Instead, Stephen Strasburg, the No. 1 draft pick most of the baseball world has never seen play, will make his minor league debut for the Double-A Harrisburg Senators on Sunday.
From MLB.com:
He’ll pitch against the Pirates’ club, the Altoona Curve, at Blair County Ballpark. There’s an amusement park beyond the walls of the park, but it’s likely the folks of Altoona have never seen a circus quite like the one that’s expected on Sunday. The Curve staff has fielded close to 70 credential requests from nearly 30 different media outlets.
“With this first one, this is his first real professional outing,” Nationals farm director Doug Harris said. “I think organizationally, we want him to walk off the mound in one piece, first and foremost. Let’s get him through it, and let’s move on. I don’t expect to see anything from him different than what he’s done.”
What he’s done unofficially has already created quite a buzz and made everyone in the nation’s capital, and perhaps around baseball, set a Strasburg timer. First he went to the Arizona Fall League and showed the ability to dominate and bounce back from a rough outing.
Then came his first big league Spring Training, where he showed the ability to get Major League hitters out based on his pure stuff. But while there may have been external pressure and expectations to put Strasburg straight into the big league rotation, it’s not something that really entered into Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo’s mind. There’s more to pitching and succeeding at the highest level than just pure stuff.
“We just want to see him develop,” Rizzo said. “Improve each and every outing. Do things that we worked on, things from the plan we want him to work on. People say he’s ready to pitch in the big leagues. I obviously don’t think so, or he’d be here. He needs to put his time in. We want it to be that once he gets to the big leagues, he stays in the big leagues.”
A couple of things here: 1) The Altoona Curve is probably the coolest name for a baseball team I’ve ever heard and 2) The ubiquitous information about the economics of baseball is, by and large, discouraging. On one hand, I willingly spend countless hours reading about front office dealings because, hey, it’s interesting. But the more and more I learn (and this is the same squabble people have with sabermetrics), I feel like my love for baseball is compromised. When Stephen Strasburg finally takes the mound in a big league game, I’m going to know every detail about his structured contract, how the team delayed his service time so they could score an extra year of arbitration, and stats that chart his projected development as it compares to other pitching phenoms. Most of us have never seen him throw, yet we know his agent’s name. I can’t even remember: Is Strasburg the one with the shutdown fastball, or is it a curveball? It’s escaping me, but I can tell you that he received a $7.5 million signing bonus. The great American pastime!
At this point, I’m sure Nationals fans wish they were left in the dark about Strasburg’s contract situation. Bottom line, their system holds possibly the best young pitcher in the game — a kid who’s perfectly healthy — and they’ll have to wait until the front office gives him the go ahead. It’s the waiting that’s the worst.
Photo from fOTOGLIF
