Stephen Strasburg, at the End

Throughout the 2019 postseason, the Washington Nationals made a habit of using their entire margin of error. They needed a three-run, last-ditch rally to get out of the Wild Card game, then another 11th-hour comeback to get past the Dodgers in Game 5 of the NLDS. Dave Martinez tried to shorten his pitching staff as much as possible, a desperation move that’s backfired on manager after manager as long as there have been playoffs.

By the time Game 6 of the World Series rolled around, the Nationals were facing elimination once again. They’d lost three straight to the 107-win Astros and needed to beat Justin Verlander on the road to stay alive. Patrick Corbin had been run ragged. Max Scherzer’s body had locked up to the point where he couldn’t dress himself. Martinez had already gambled with the likes of Tanner Rainey and Wander Suero more than anyone was comfortable with.

Then Stephen Strasburg stepped up and did something you don’t see pitchers do much anymore. He handled it.

After a rocky first inning, Strasburg kept the irrepressible Astros offense off the board into the ninth. The Nats once again scored bunches of runs late, and the next evening they were hoisting the proverbial piece of metal.

Strasburg’s last outing of 2019 marks the only time since 2015 that the day’s starting pitcher recorded an out in the ninth inning of a World Series. It’s the only instance since 2017 of a starting pitcher recording an out in the ninth inning of any playoff game. Strasburg was voted World Series MVP for his effort.

There’s a pretty good case to be made that Strasburg, a pitcher whose most famous playoff starts are arguably the ones he didn’t make, is the best postseason pitcher in major league history. Among pitchers with at least 50 playoff innings, Strasburg has the fifth-lowest ERA, behind Mariano Rivera, Christy Mathewson, Sandy Koufax, and Eddie Plank, all Hall of Famers. No starter in the past 50 years can match him: not Curt Schilling or Madison Bumgarner. Not even Bob Gibson, pitching in the second dead ball era.

The night of Game 6, I wrote about Strasburg’s hero-making start as the capstone of a unique Nationals career, a poetic counterweight to the controversial innings limit that had kept him from participating in Washington’s first postseason run in 2012. Strasburg had the option to become a free agent after the 2019 season, and it was far from a certainty that the Nats — who’d just let Bryce Harper walk the previous winter — would give a 31-year-old pitcher the kind of money Strasburg had so clearly earned. I was confident that this would be Strasburg’s last appearance in a Nationals uniform.

I was wrong, but only technically. Strasburg duly opted out, but Washington brought him back after all, on a seven-year, $245 million contract that runs through 2026. But Strasburg made just eight starts over three seasons before injuries erased the second half of what ought to have been a Hall of Fame career. And not normal injuries, like a torn UCL or an uncooperative rotator cuff: neuritis, and ultimately thoracic outlet syndrome, the closest thing there is to an unrecoverable pitcher injury.

Strasburg still has three years and more than $100 million left on his contract, so he won’t officially retire just yet. But last Thursday the Washington Post reported that Strasburg would be giving up on a comeback attempt that’s looked all but hopeless for years. The official announcement will come sometime after Labor Day.

As far as I’m concerned, those last eight injury-riddled starts never happened, and our final memory of Strasburg as a player will be of him toting the Commissioner’s Trophy around the Minute Maid Park outfield in the wake of the Nationals’ Game 7 win. Hirsute and broad and immutable, like a forest. Larger than life.

What a career for Stephen Strasburg ?

?? 3× All-Star
?? 2019 World Series champion
?? World Series MVP
?? 2019 Babe Ruth Award
?? 2019 All-MLB First Team pic.twitter.com/vZ6Vj0JeXR

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) August 24, 2023

What a way to go out.

Whenever a player with Hall of Fame talent is forced to retire through injury, there’s a sense of communal grief. People who love baseball understand that there’s unfulfilled potential that’s been lost, and we mourn because we’re worse off for not seeing it fulfilled.

I don’t think that’s appropriate in Strasburg’s case, because even though he lost a full season early in his career to Tommy John surgery and was basically done at age 31, I don’t think there’s much more he could have accomplished. He played eight full seasons in the majors, and parts of 13. He was the most important player on a championship team and won an Olympic bronze medal. He never won a Cy Young — never even finished second — but he made three All-Star teams. When he was healthy, Strasburg was among the best pitchers in baseball. Oh, and by the time he collects his last check from the Nationals, he’ll have made the best part of $400 million. It’s not Roger Clemens without the PEDs, which was the hype when Strasburg was coming out of San Diego State, but it’s a hard career to complain about.

But while Strasburg’s retirement doesn’t leave behind the same whiff of disappointment as Matt Harvey or Mark Prior, it hurts to know his career is officially over.

Strasburg has always been one of my favorite players to write about — a former editor of mine once joked that Strasburg was my “muse” — and I doubt I’m alone. As much as I could go on about his physicality, his fastball, his scythe of a curveball, and how they affected the game empirically, the two things that made Strasburg into a legendary figure are completely ineffable.

The first was his ability to inspire wonder. If you can recall the hype around Strasburg as a college player, you don’t need to be reminded. But it’s a bit bracing to look back 15 years later and think about the mythical prospect status Strasburg carried in that now-primitive media environment.

In 2008, there was no multifaceted public-facing prospect coverage, little or no streaming media, and only a rudimentary network of blogs and social media to cover the minutiae of baseball. If you wanted to know about college baseball, you either had to subscribe to Baseball America, go and watch it in person, or wait until the College World Series was on cable.

Despite all that, Strasburg was a household name, a Tony Gwynn protégé with a triple-digit fastball and a breaking ball that was close to literally unhittable. As a college sophomore, he not only made an Olympic team full of upper-minors prospects, but was selected to start the tournament semifinal. In the years since, a more rabid and better-informed baseball-watching public has seen Carlos Rodón or Kumar Rocker or Paul Skenes mow down hapless undergraduates, and we’ve gasped in the collective realization that this is what it looks like, only more so.

That, ramped up to an intensity unseen in the pre-Shohei Ohtani era, was Strasburg. His major league debut was a national TV event, the most important thing that had happened to a D.C.-based baseball team in decades. Strasburg obliged the audience by punching out 14 Pirates. Plenty of rookies have built up national hype over time, but almost none were as highly anticipated as Strasburg. Follow baseball long enough and events will start to blur together, but I not only remember where I was for Strasburg’s debut, but where I was when I found out he’d torn his UCL three months later.

That air of specialness never really went away, even to the end of his prime. And even when Strasburg turned out to merely be one of the best pitchers in the sport and not the best pitcher in the sport, that sparkle didn’t fade. In fact, it almost made Strasburg more fascinating. Every time you went to the park or turned on the TV for his night on the mound, the possibility remained that you’d see something special. But it never got so routine, as it did with Clayton Kershaw, that we took it for granted. The precarity that came with Strasburg’s perceived fragility made him all the more precious.

Strasburg’s first great gift compounded with his second: History kept happening to him.

That’s different from a flair for the dramatic. Strasburg, great as he was in big games, was stonefaced on the mound and fairly laconic off it. No great celebrations or memorable quotes spring to mind. Just among his Nationals teammates, Scherzer, Harper, and Juan Soto have all shown themselves to be aware when the lights are brightest, and seem to amp themselves up for the occasion. They thrive under pressure. Other players wilt under it. Strasburg seemed unaware of it, pitching in the World Series with all the adrenaline and ceremony that comes with mowing your lawn.

It’s also distinct from popping up around big moments, like Strasburg’s former manager Dusty Baker. Baker was in the on-deck circle for Hank Aaron’s 715th home run. He was party to the invention of the high five. He was in the dugout for Barry Bonds and Steve Bartman. He bumps into historic occasions like Forrest Gump.

Strasburg seemed to pull history toward himself, like a planet attracting a wandering comet. In 2012, he found himself at the center of a watershed moment in the debate over pitching workloads, a controversy that’s conditioned the development of every young pitcher who’s come along since and is still probably the most important moment of Strasburg’s career.

Five years later, after taking a no-hitter into the sixth inning of Game 1 of the NLDS, Strasburg fell ill the day of his next scheduled start, touching off one of the last great salvos of performative machismo in sports. When Strasburg came back, he shut the Cubs down for seven innings in damp, misty conditions at Wrigley Field, answering for good any questions about his toughness or will.

In less than six years since, the way we talk about athletes’ physical and mental health has changed so much as to render previous norms unrecognizable.

And then there’s Strasburg’s 2019 playoff run, which capped off that aforementioned legacy of playoff excellence.

With his metronomic consistency, Strasburg put a 106-win Dodgers team off the rails, then did the same to the Astros. Remember, that series was supposed to be the cherry on the top of a historic season by Houston’s front-of-the-rotation duo of Verlander and Gerrit Cole. But Strasburg held back the tide, leaving the cameras to fade out on an aggrieved and befuddled Astros team that, just a month later, would find itself embroiled in a generational scandal.

I’ll miss watching and writing about Strasburg because he was great, yes. Because he was exciting. But most of all because he was important. Baseball’s familiar abundance can make living with the sport a bit monotonous, as it’s difficult to find a reason to get up for a September game between third- and fourth-place teams with nothing on the line.

There was always something on the line with Strasburg. Every pitch he threw mattered. Sometimes because the fate of the World Series or the course of player development obviously hung in the balance. Sometimes, you couldn’t exactly name a reason. But you could always feel it.