A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Merry Strasmas

The Washington Nationals (a baseball team for those wondering) drafted a 20 year old pitcher from San Diego named Stephen Strasburg exactly one year ago today.  The hype surrounding this kid has been Lebron-like for nearly 12 full months.  Before ever throwing one professional pitch, Strasburg received the highest contract of any draft pick in Major League Baseball history ($15.1 million).  He has also garnered almost nightly national attention on ESPN's Sportscenter and Baseball Tonight.

With so much pressure mounting on such young shoulders, I kind of assumed he would crash-and-burn in his debut against the Pittsburgh Pirates last night.

I was wrong.

Sports columnist Dave Sheinin of the The Washington Post put it this way:

If it was possible to live up to that hype, the tall, sturdy kid with lightning in his right arm and the hopes of a beleaguered fan base in his hands did it, pitching magnificently for seven innings in a 5-2 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates in his major league debut. The strikeouts piled up -- 14 of them in all, a Nationals team record, each raising the electricity level in the stadium -- and the innings rolled by. Only one slip-up, a two-run homer in the fourth inning, marred the scorecard.

"Everybody is impressed with what this kid did today," said Iván Rodríguez, the Nationals' veteran catcher and a presumed future Hall-of-Famer. "He completely dominated."

When the team announced in the middle of the seventh inning that Strasburg had set a Nationals team record for strikeouts, the sell-out crowd of 40,315 demanded a curtain call, and Strasburg obliged, climbing the dugout steps and doffing his cap to all sides, his buzzcut hair glistening with sweat.

"It was a great atmosphere," Strasburg said later. "I definitely felt everyone pulling for me."

Never had the nation's capital, or perhaps the nation itself, seen a professional athlete debut with so much hype and media saturation. The team handed out more than 200 media credentials -- equivalent to a late-October playoff game -- as an otherwise pedestrian early-June game was transformed into the most singular sort of Washington event.

I know this is site dedicated primarily to cultural and political issues, but in my world, baseball is still America's past-time and this young pitcher is the biggest story in baseball today.  If you haven't seen any highlights of the kid, do yourself a favor and watch this video of Stasburg's 14 strike-outs.