No Shit?

I hate it when I'm right. It appears that the great and powerful Stephen Strasburg is now gone almost as soon as he arrived with the news that he will require Tommy John Surgery for his torn Ulnar Collateral Ligament. Strasburg will be out for the remainder of this season and the 2011 season as well. I've read balloon-heads like Tim Kurkjian call this a "shame for baseball", but I certainly wouldn't got that far. I'm pretty sure the game will be just fine despite this injury to a pitcher on a shitty team. To that shitty team's credit though, they definitely handled him with kid gloves as he never threw more than 99 pitches in a game all season.

I did find an interesting article about The Inverted W on mlb.com. The article does give credit to White Sox Pitching Coach Don Cooper for predicting that Strasburg does things incorrectly with his mechanics, and that he will eventually suffer arm problems. I find this a bit ironic as one of Cooper's bullpen specialists Matt Thornton is now on the DL with Elbow Inflammation, but to Coop's credit he did say what he said about Strasburg. There's other pitching coaches who offer differing theories, but none of it changes the fact that Strasburg WAS guilty of the elbow rising above the shoulder blade, and is now facing the worst surgery a pitcher can go through.

Do I think Strasburg can comeback? Absolutely he can, but as Kerry Wood showed us it's very tough to come back to the same dominant level after the surgery despite being a young guy. It's going to be even tougher for Strasburg to be dominant again if he chooses not to alter his mechanics. Otherwise, he'll have the same issues creep up again that caught up with him now.

One more thing that every team should note....NEVER pick a kid that's represented by Scott Boras.