Stephen Strasburg Is Pitching Hope

Sports Saturday

There is nothing like a brilliant rookie pitcher to breathe life back into the game of baseball. Living less than two hours from our nation’s capital, I’m in the midst of the unbridled excitement over the Washington Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg.

Strasburg had a bad outing as he came off Injured Reserve this past Tuesday, but he has, at times, been phenomenal this season, calling to mind other rookie pitcher sensations like Dwight “Dr. K” Gooden, Mark “the Bird” Fidrych and (perhaps the greatest of them all) Fernando Valenzuela, who in his rookie year won the Cy Young award while taking the Dodgers to the playoffs.

Before his injury, Strasburg had been having his own meteoric start. In his debut against the Pirates, he pitched seven innings, allowing two earned runs and no walks while striking out 14 batters. He struck out eight and ten batters in his subsequent two starts. According to Sport Illustrated writer Albert Chen, “Against the Indians, Strasburg started the game (against leadoff hitter Trevor Crowe) with a 100 mile-per-hour fastball for a called strike, tossed two curveballs with a ridiculous 13-inch break, then finished Crowe off with two straight 100 mph heaters. The guy next to me in the press box and I just looked at each other and shook our heads.”

The excitement that such a rookie pitcher can generate is captured in Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. The novel is about an aging beer-guzzling accountant who spices up his otherwise dull and solitary life with a fantasy baseball association that he has created. His name, J. Waugh, hints at Jahweh, the Hebrew name for God. Waugh, like God, has created an entire universe.

When the book opens, we see the pitcher, Damon Rutherford, going for a perfect game after what has been a long dry spell in Waugh’s league. We all know about such dry spells.  Coover describes them this way:

Henry hadn’t been so excited in weeks. Months. That was the way it was, some days seemed to pass almost without being seen, games lived through, decisions made, averages rising or dipping, and all of it happening in a kind of fog, until one day that astonishing event would occur that brought sudden life and immediacy to the Association, and everybody would suddenly wake up and wonder at the time that had got by them, go back to the box scores, try to find out what had happened. During those dull-minded stretches, even a home run was nothing more than an HR penned into the box score; sure, there was a fence and a ball sailing over it, but Henry didn’t see them—oh, he heard the shouting of the faithful, yes, they stayed with it, they had to, but to him it was just a distant echo, static that let you know it was still going on. But then, contrarily, when someone like Damon Rutherford came along to flip the switch, turn things on, why, even a pop-up to the pitcher took on excitement, a certain dimension, color.

Coover concludes the passage in a way that gets at the contrast between Waugh’s humdrum existence and his fantasy life:

The magic of excellence. Under its charm, he threw the dice: Abernathy struck out. Two down, one to go! It could happen, it could happen! Henry reeled around his chair a couple times, laughed out loud, went to urinate again.

When Damon miraculously throws a perfect game (no hits, walks or errors), Waugh finds a new spring in his middle-aged step. He goes to a bar to celebrate, buys drinks for the house, and experiences a surge of virility that ends in a magical night of lovemaking with an aging prostitute. He tells her to call him Damon:

“Damon,” she whispered, unbuckling his pants, pulling his shirt out. And “Damon,” she sighed, stroking his back, unzipping his fly, sending his pants earthward with a rattle of buckles and coins. And “Damon!” she greeted, grabbing—and that girl, with one swing, he knew then, could bang a pitch clean out of the park. “Play ball!” cried the umpire. And the catcher, stripped of mask and guard, revealed as the pitcher Damon Rutherford, whipped the uniform off the first lady ballplayer in Association history, and then, helping and hindering all at once, pushing and pulling, they ran the bases, pounded into first, slid into second heels high, somersaulted over third, shot home standing up, then into the box once more, swing away, and run them all again, and “Damon!” she cried, and “Damon!”

Talk about taking the “did you score?” analogy to new lyrical heights!

Anyway, that’s the way it has been in Washington and the surrounding area this summer as fans breathlessly await each Strasburg start. It doesn’t matter that the Nationals are hopelessly out of the pennant race. It doesn’t matter that we have 100-degree temperatures and 90 percent humidity. It doesn’t matter that Washington is gridlocked and politicians are posturing and unemployment is high. A rookie phenom has entered the scene and life seems a little brighter.

“Steve!” we all cry, and “Steve!”