Nationals shouldn’t shut down Stephen Strasburg

Washington Nationals ace Stephen Strasburg is 15 and 5 with a 2.85 ERA on the best team in baseball, but due to his history of injuries (most recently Tommy John surgery last year), the team plans to shut him down after he hits 180 innings.

Strasburg currently sits at 145.1 innings meaning he’ll likely be shut down sometime in mid-September and miss the playoffs.

You’d really expect experienced baseball hands like Nationals Manager Davey Johnson and General Manager Mike Rizzo would be smart enough to realize what a ridiculously stupid idea this is.

In sports and life, it’s always comfortable to plan out a path, and stick strictly to it, even when circumstances change. Consistency is often a virtue, but in this case it’s not. 

The Nationals could legitimately win the World Series this year. This is a fact. They’re having one of those special years in sports where everything just seems to fall into place. 

But Rizzo, Johnson, and the Nationals medical staff still plan to spurn this stroke of luck.  They want to preserve Strasburg for the future. And they likely think there will be plenty of World Series’ in their future with the young nucleus they’ve put together. 

You know, kind of like how the Dolphins figured they would be back to get the 49ers next time after they lost Super Bowl XIX with second year star quarterback Dan Marino in 1984. Marino played 15 more years. They never made it back.

But at least they went for it. They didn’t try to protect their young star from injury and give up their special season in the process.

With Strasburg wearing a sweatshirt and spitting sunflower seeds in the dugout, there’s pretty much no chance the Nationals win the World Series.

Memo to the Nationals, this is sports.  It’s unpredictable. People get hurt. Especially people like Strasburg who throw a baseball 99 miles per hour on a regular basis.

This decision is nothing more than hubris of the worst order, and also goes to the heart of a basic problem with baseball today.

Managers and management have decided the game can be chalked up to a bunch of formulas you plug into a computer in an attempt to take emotion out of the process. But baseball isn’t math. And ignoring the human component like the Nationals are doing right now is always foolish.

I’m not even completely crushing the Moneyball approach, I like that Billy Beane tried something new because he had no money. But human decisions can’t be based solely on statistics.

But there are no statistics backing the decision to shut down Strasburg, just a spineless brand of caution.

Baseball is a game of feel and instincts. It always has been, and always will be. And if Mike Rizzo and Davey Johnson used their baseball instincts here, something tells me they would go for it. There’s something special going on in Washington this summer and it’s foolish to act like you know it will ever be replicated again.