Some things about Stephen Strasburg

The Blitzkrieg with pie on his face. Nice game, rook.

The history of humanity is littered with those who couldn't live up to the hype. Kwame Brown, Darko Miličić, Mark Prior, Brien Taylor. Every now and then, though, someone actually breaks through. When LeBron James was first coming into the NBA, and the hype surrounding him was at its height, I remember thinking that there wasn't any way for him to match expectations. Somehow, he did.

Seven innings pitched, 14 strikeouts, no walks.

I didn't think that there was any way that Stephen Strasburg could possibly come close to living up to the hype. I mean, Curt Schilling said a few weeks ago that he'd be the best pitcher in the majors the day he first stepped on a mound. These were lofty expectations that Strasburg had been saddled with. And somehow he actually surpassed them.
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I don't want to go too far into this, for a few reasons. Most of what can be said has already been said by people who said it better than I would have anyway. But I do want to mention a few things.

First of all, we need to not get too far ahead of ourselves. His first game was spectacular, but I've heard people talking about the Hall of Fame already. Nick Evans looked like a Hall of Famer after one game and now nobody even knows who he is. It was against the Pirates, it was a pitchers' umpire...blah blah blah. My newfound sabermetrics expertise leads me to say that the sample size is far too small to make a real judgement.

Now that I have that out of the way, HOLY CRAP DID YOU SEE HIM PITCH. I have never seen anything like that. Literally. I've been watching baseball for a long time, and I've never seen a pitcher like Stephen Strasburg, even for one start. I went to a restaurant with some friends to watch him. I was the only one who really wanted him to do well; one was a Pirates fan, the other didn't really have a reason that I'm aware of. They were both talking some smack before he started pitching. After about an inning, it died down because there wasn't anything to say. He gave up a home run; it was on a good pitch. He made next to no mistakes.

The most impressive thing to me was the fact that I was impressed by him. I'm not usually easily impressed, but at one point during the game I actually yelled with surprise at one of Strasburg's curveballs. It was moving at apparent fastball speed, and then it dropped about two feet. I have no idea how anyone's supposed to hit that.

It's going to be a little while before we know how good Stephen Strasburg's going to be over the long-term. But for one night, I'm willing to throw sample size and rationality out the window. That was a damned good performance by Strasburg last night, and it was fun to watch. And I am impressed.

(Could we ditch the "Mr. Precedent" nickname, also? Because it's horrible. Come up with something more awesome. Like The Blitzkrieg - after all, he does have a German-ish name.)