A convincing case for shutting Stasburg down?

As someone who has watched him all year long I really don't need convincing. He was easily one of the most dominant pitchers in the game throughout the summer. As he approached this magic 160 innings he just didn't LOOK right. He was getting hit early, hard, and often, walking a ton of guys, his velocity was down a bit, his curveball the used to just fall off the table...he'd hang it right in there. His WHIP and ERA were steadily rising and he was obviously just not all there mentally. I'm sure the media hype had SOMETHING to do with it, but think about it... how many Strasburg interviews did you see with Strasburg himself? Not many, I saw maybe one or two sound bites given to the local sports channel here. So that didn't have a lot to do with it. Perhaps if he was in New York City and had the media following him around 24/7 hounding him for an interview this would be more plausible. This is just not the case for sports media here in the DC Metro area. His performance was suffering, he had to go.

PS: He's more OK with this decision than the team would have you believe. They didn't expect (nobody did for that matter) for this club to be in the position it's in, so they had to spin this in Strasburgs' favor for the sake of the media. Imagine if they were a little over .500, 5-6 GB from the second WC spot...would people even care? No, they'd be praising Rizzo for protecting his players and treating them as humans rather than possessions.

You can't make a convincing case one way or the other. For Strasburg, this may be the correct decision, or it may have been unnecessary. There's no way to determine this by comparing against other pitchers.

First, each situation is different, and has different unknowns. Second, you can find pitchers who went one way or the other, but the sample size is too small to come up with anything definitive.

With your example, you've chosen one pitcher, and are basing a rationale on 25 innings pitched. That's way too small a sample to make any conclusions.

The only way to know if a decision was right or wrong would be to let him pitch, then have him blow out his arm. You know that was wrong. Anything else is uncertain.

Are there examples where pitchers came back and blew out their arms? I'm pretty sure there are, and if you hold that example up, then it would be clear that the Nationals are making the right decision.

So, what it comes down to is this - the Nationals made the right decision based on the information and opinions that the Nationals are working with. It's kind of like a judgment call by an umpire -

Every pitcher is different. For example, Josh Johnson

April 4 - August 25:

157.1 innings pitch, 70 ER, 4.00 ERA

August 26 - September 12

22.0 innings pitch, 6 ER, 2.45 ERA

I respectfully don't agree.

Today's Pitchers are too spoiled & babied. I never seen Ron Guidry Nolan Ryan Bob Gibson Roger Clemens(In his early years) & countless others ever had to be shut down.

You can find plenty of examples to support either side of this argument. I suspect it will follow the old pendulum effect. It used to swing way out towards abuse. Now it's swinging way out towards being too conservative. Eventually it will settle somewhere in between.