It tells you something that Stephen Strasburg has provoked a debate as to whether or not he should be part of the all-star proceedings despite (at this writing) four dazzling major league starts and the kind of public acclaim earned once upon a time by a comparably-dazzling sprout named Dwight Gooden.
For the record, I'm a little on the fence about the all-star berth. No question Strasburg is a fan magnet and, thus far, he's got the performance papers to back it up despite not having thrown his first major league pitch until this month. I'm not all that enticeable into endorsing that fresh a sprout for the All-Star Game, never mind the foibles of the game itself, as against others having sterling full first halves, but neither am I all that enticeable into opposing it.
I've got more important things on my brain when it comes to Stephen Strasburg. Such things as what it should tell you that only a very, very few — Jeff Pearlman comes to mind at once — are debating a far more grave question on the periphery of which Strasburg again may compare to Gooden:
Are the Washington Nationals going to ruin the prodigy before his time? Forget about whether he was rushed to the Show. He's proving well enough that he belongs. The question is whether, now that he's here, someone in his own organization is going to decide that it just isn't good enough to go out there and pitch as though he's got 10 years, 120 wins, and near 2,000 strikeouts on his jacket already.
Ponder this, if you dare: the Nats' brain trust is already making the kind of noise that should have been taken as a dire warning in the wake of the Gooden story, a warning that reads: if it isn't broken, don't call the repairmen. Strasburg was barely two stupefying, dominating starts into his major league career when the whisperings turned to full-volume talking out of the Nats' camp.
"Don't expect to see double-digit strikeouts too often," manager Jim Riggleman told reporters. "He's going to be more of a ground ball pitcher, like Ubaldo Jimenez, than a strikeout pitcher like Roger Clemens or Kerry Wood. It's better to get three outs on 12 pitches than three strikeouts on 18."
On the one hand, maybe Riggleman was smart in expressing that kind of knotty tinker-happiness early enough that it can't fracture Strasburg's confidence too greatly. But it still isn't a smart idea, and you have only to remember Dwight Gooden's sad story to know why.
For his first two seasons, Gooden owned the National League and maybe the game. A fastball to which not even the Thunderbirds could catch up. A curve ball that was maybe the most curvaceous such pitch anyone had seen since Sandy Koufax's big, voluptuous deuce. It was all he had and all he needed, and you needed no evidence further than a 43-8 won-lost record, a 2.04 ERA, and 544 strikeouts those first two campaigns.
Then the Mets decided, in spring training 1986, that Gooden, who wasn't broken, needed to be fixed up a little bit. Needed more pitches, never mind whether he could actually throw them well enough.
Jeff Pearlman couldn't help remembering the precedent. He got Ed Hearn, who spoke well enough of the dilemma in The Bad Guys Won (Pearlman's excellent and rather sad review of the 1986 Mets), to speak up once more for Sports Illustrated.
"They want to make him more 'efficient'," Pearlman tells Hearn of the Nats viz Strasburg. "So he doesn't waste pitches."
"Dwight Gooden," Hearn replies. "They said the same thing about Doc way back when. The exact same thing."
The Mets, influenced powerfully enough by otherwise becalmed and farsighted pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, decided that the child prodigy with the least hittable four-seam fastball and the least knowable curve ball in the business needed more. They decided he needed to learn a changeup for which he could never quite get the hang or the grip. They decided he needed to add a two-seam fastball to the repertoire, the better to get the grounders that might or might not turn into base hits along the way. Allow for the fact that Gooden did have a rather weighty workload his first two seasons, then throw in that he didn't seem any worse off for it.
Now, remember Gooden in spring 1986 and throughout the Mets' otherwise stupefying run to the postseason. The kid who went out to the mound in 1984 and 1985 looking for all the world as though behind that composed exterior lurked the mind and heart of an absolute assassin who knew what he was doing on the mound now resembled a kid who didn't know which end was up by comparison.
He had about six or seven different landing points as opposed to the one or two on which he lived previously. "There were four catchers with the team [in spring training] — [Gary] Carter, Ed Hearn, Barry Lyons, and John Gibbons — who had handled Gooden at one point or another. All four agreed that Stottlemyre's plan was poorly thought out. 'I remember catching him one day in the bullpen, and they were working with him on the two-seam,' says Hearn. 'I'm thinking, What the hell is this? He was a power pitcher with tons of movement, and they're trying to teach him movement? What the hell for?"
It didn't stop with Stottlemyre. General manager Frank Cashen prodded the prodigy to shorten that striding leg kick of his the better to keep the other guys from running on him. Another Met executive, Joe McIlvaine, began beating the drums against striking out all those hitters. Still others suggested this and that, and the pliant Gooden made a tragic mistake to compound it all. He listened to every last one of them.
And he became ordinary good. The Mets got what they wanted in 1986 — Gooden struck out a mere 200. But he also won only 17 games and, except for one magnificent duel against Nolan Ryan in the National League Championship Series, he didn't pitch well during the Mets' surreal postseason run. And he may also have ramped what had begun as a mere occasional recreation into a full-time, full-blown habit, the one that got him into rehab for the first time to open 1987.
He also damaged his shoulder. Dwight Gooden's career became as notable for his shoulder trouble as for all those occasional laments of what might have been. We'll never really know whether the substance abuse issues that finally brought him to the brink of suicide all those years later were launched in earnest by an unspoken frustration (Gooden was never the type to blow his own horn in the first place) that he had been sent from off-the-chart greatness to mere workability and that, eager to please soul that he was, he had helped punch the ticket.
Gooden himself had a sad precedent. When Joe Black knocked the National League on its ear in 1952 (Rookie of the Year, and the first black pitcher to start and win a World Series game), Brooklyn Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen, too, decided Black needed more. He forced Black to learn to throw a different kind of curve ball than the one he'd used so effectively. The problem was that Black was, physically, incapable of throwing the pitch in the first place. But determined to please his manager, Black kept at it. By season's end, he was a mess, in his statistics and in his head. He went from 15-4/2.15 in 1952 to 20-10/6.51 for the rest of his career, which ended in 1957.
Here's who the Nationals ought to listen to: John McGraw.
McGraw latched onto a prodigy who wasn't a pitcher, but who could hit about 10 tons. The Little Napoleon was bigtime petrified that some manager or coach down on the farm would get one look at this kid's magnificent — and weird — swing (he was a left-handed hitter who strode into the pitch about the way Dwight Gooden strode toward the plate: with a high leg kick and big stride forward) and do to him precisely as Dressen would do with Black, the Mets would do with Gooden, and the Nationals are threatening to do with Strasburg.
Managers being just a little more powerful in those years than they are now, McGraw prevailed. He kept the kid right next to him on the bench for two years, teaching the boy everything there was to teach about the game, letting him into a few games to loosen him up and build up his confidence, and then turned him loose once and for all.
The kid merely became an eleven-time all-star, a six-time home run champion, a three-time World Series competitor with one ring to show for the three, and got to retire as the National League's home run king until another Giant — a fellow named Mays — ambled along and drove him out of the record book.
The kid's name was Mel Ott.
If the Washington Nationals want Stephen Strasburg to last as long as possible and pitch as well as possible, they'll ignore such precedents as the 1986 Mets or the 1953 Dodgers. They'll hark back instead to the 1926-27 Giants, to John McGraw and his prodigy Mel Ott, who probably would have had one hell of a time hitting Strasburg no matter how magnificent was his unorthodox swing.
Then just leave Strasburg alone and tell him to strike out as many hitters as he sees fit. (And forget the Clemens precedent, unless you want this kid to fall into ugly questions about actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances. Point to Nolan Ryan. He pitched 27 seasons and became a Hall of Famer by trying to strike out as many hitters as he could. Just don't let his software get as stunted as Ryan's was, where a typical game becomes a ton of strikeouts and a ton of walks. The kid's already got it over Ryan in that department.)
Because they're not pondering Strasburg for a possibly premature All-Star Game appearance because he's getting the hitters to beat so many balls into the ground they're turning Nationals Park into an oil field.
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