[quote]Maiden3.16 wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]Maiden3.16 wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]Maiden3.16 wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]Maiden3.16 wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]Maiden3.16 wrote:
Can I change my MVP to Hamilton? dude is fucking tearing it up, another HR today. Also Strasburg is showing again today that he will never be a top flight pitcher by going 6 IP 0 ER against the Marlins so far. [/quote]
Last I checked, top-flight pitchers don’t get pinch-hit for after only 6 innings and 94 pitches when they’re in the middle of a shutout. When he proves that he can throw 200+ innings, make 35 starts and throw 100+ pitches per start over the course of a full season, THEN I’ll consider him a top-flight pitcher. And then you make all the thinly-veiled comments toward me about him that you want. But until then, temper your enthusiasm a little bit.
I’m sorry, but there’s simply NO WAY you can consider a starting pitcher with a 160-inning limit one of the top pitchers in the game. Entering this season, I would have taken about a dozen pitchers over him (Kershaw, Verlander, Halladay, Cain, Felix, Hamels, Lee, Sabathia, Weaver, Haren, Wilson, and maybe even Price or Shields). Why? Because the toughest, most important innings a starting pitcher throws are innings 160 thru 200-220. Those are down-the-stretch, crunch-time innings. Those are the innings where every day is a fucking grind through August and September and if you can pitch well consistently at that time of the year, you separate yourself from the rest of the pack and, provided your team is in contention, those are the innings that mean the most to your team. Unless things change, which I doubt they will, Strasburg will be shut down at 160 innings. So while he rests, the top-flight pitchers will be grinding away down the stretch. When he’s one of those guys and he dominates the way he is now, then he’s a top-flight pitcher.
He may be throwing better than just about anyone in the majors right now, but until the above is true he simply isn’t in that upper-echelon yet. In that game, a top-flight pitcher throws into the 7th or 8th and gives his team a better chance to win. Right now, he’s simply a really, really good pitcher with an innings limit.[/quote]
Strasburg is the Ace of that staff (which is a pretty decent staff btw) and has done nothing but be successful since his first day in the bigs. You can make “top fligh pitcher” into whatever definition you want to keep stranburg out of that category your mind, but imo 3ER in 25 innings so far is pretty damn good for someone you said will NEVER be a top flight pitcher because you think you are some expert on mechanics and he is “flawed.”
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Give me a fucking break. 25 innings is a completely irrelevant sample size. If 25 innings and 3 earned runs makes a pitcher top-flight, what makes a pitcher who hasn’t allowed a baserunner in his last 9 innings of work? God? Would anyone here consider Phil Humber top-flight? Of course not.
Furthermore, yes, Strasburg has dominated when he’s pitched. WHEN being the key word. We’re talking about someone who has made a grand total of 20 starts in the major leagues, over the course of almost two years. 20 starts, with a major elbow reconstruction surgery in the middle, is hardly enough of a sample size to call someone already a top-flight pitcher. The sample size tells me that he CAN be that good when he’s healthy. I mean, we’re talking about a pitcher with less than a year’s worth of experience in the majors. Even if he had accumulated all 20 starts in one season instead of sandwiched around an elbow surgery and a shoulder injury, it’s still too small a sample size to say that he’s arrived. And when a pitcher is a top-flight pitcher, he has ARRIVED. Strasburg is on his way, but he hasn’t arrived yet.[/quote]
Atleast you acknkowledge his is on his way there as opposed to never getting there.
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With his current mechanics, I don’t think he’ll ever get “there”. And if he does, I don’t expect it to last long. I could be wrong. But the fact is that he is NOT there right now.[/quote]
I disagree[/quote]
Fine. Whatever.[/quote]
To beat this dead horse once more:
I firmly believe Strasburg is on his way “there” because of his mechanics, not in spite of them. I think this is where we disagree. I think his injuries are more to do with his workload his rookie year when he went fromn pitching in college to being drafted and working his way to the bigleagues all in one year. Tinkering with his mechanics has the potential to be disaterous. Not only does he have 100mph heat but also great movement on his pitches, which are due to his mechanics imo. Changing them could lead to less repeatable delivery, loss of movement, loss of velocity. Dontrelle Willis a fine example. [/quote]
That’s ridiculous. In college, he routinely threw deeper into games with higher pitch counts than he was allowed to in the minors. Also, he didn’t really throw that many more innings in the minors than in college before he was called up. And when he was called up, he only lasted about 12 starts before he hurt his shoulder and then blew his elbow out shortly after coming off the DL. He wasn’t really overworked at all. If anything, he was babied along.
The fact is that many pitchers throw more innings early in their careers than Strasburg. Matt Cain is a perfect example. The jump in innings pitched that he made from his senior year in high school to when he was 20 and making his major league debut was FAR greater than Strasburg’s jump in innings. Cain threw the rest of that year, making about 20 starts without pitch count restrictions (he threw a complete game in one of his first starts), and hasn’t missed one since.
So what is it that allows some pitchers to assume a pretty heavy workload early in their career and remain healthy while others with similar and sometimes even less workloads blow their elbows out? Mechanics. It’s not just random luck of the draw. You or I may argue back and forth about why he got injured and what this portends for the future, but the reality is that most scouts with far more expertise than either of us pointed overwhelmingly toward his mechanics as the reason for his breakdown. They may be the same mechanics that give him his great stuff, but they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Also, Dontrelle Willis isn’t even close to relevant to this discussion. First of all, he’s a lefty and everyone knows that lefty’s are kooky and totally unpredictable to begin with. Secondly, his mechanics were way worse than Strasburg’s but in a different way. He doesn’t throw as hard either, which means the strain the arm experiences isn’t as great. The fact is that when you throw 100 mph, the strain on your arm due to any mechanical deficiency will reach a breaking point much sooner. There’s a reason why it’s much more common to see a pitcher who throws 100 lose velocity after a few years than it is to see a pitcher who throws 91 lose similar velocity over the same amount of years.