Bang, Zoom Go the Fireworks”

News that Stephen Strasburg had signed a contract with the Washington Nationals will be greeted with a sigh of relief as the news seeps into what has been called a sleepy southern town.  The sleep will disappear quickly as news spreads that the Nationals got their man–driving a hard bargain and keeping the $15.67 million price tag well below all of the estimates. 

The signing was logged at 11:58 and 43 seconds.  Stan Kasten, ever the master of the meaningless, said, “We didn’t even need that last minute.”  The statement belies the anxiety level that ramped up on Sunday and continued throughout Monday evening among Nationals fans who began to fear the worst.

There were pieces on every web site, divided fairly evenly among the believers and skeptics.  CBS Sportsline took Stan Kasten remarks from a Saturday interview and reached a skeptica l conclusion, while Baseball America’s Jim Callis played out the same interview as a positive in “ Much Ado About Nothing ,” saying that the signing was going to happen.

I was ready to go either way.  I had columns prepared for both eventualities and it was Tom Boswell’s great piece on Sunday morning that nailed the reality the best for me.  Both Ted Lerner and Scott Boras are smart men who needed to succeed on this one, but there was a worrying sentence in the last paragraph.

Boswell had talked to both the Lerners and Boras late in the week and laid out the bargaining positions each was sticking to.  But the decision came down to Strasburg himself.  He has always been portrayed as a level-headed, mature young man who could handle the hype and deliver in the pinch.  Yet in the last paragraph of his article, Boswell talks of a discussion he had with Strasburg at the All-Star Game earlier this summer.  Boswell asks Strasburg if he has been working on his change-up and the young man says he already has one.  So I began to project a column where a headstrong Stephen Strasburg failed to sign in the last minutes before midnight, to be entitled, “Gone in Sixty Seconds.”

I watched numerous videos of Strasburg on the mound.  The electric fast ball, the huge slider.  That was all that Bob Gibson needed to get started, but Gibby refined his arsenal over the years and he did not pitch to a 1.12 ERA with just two options.

So it was discouraging to hear that Strasburg thinks he has enough already.  That was the response of an immature kid and without a dose of humility Strasburg could believe his own hype and head to Japan or the Independent Leagues so he could get a better offer in a year.

Thank the baseball gods that I was wrong.  Stephen Strasburg wants to play ball more than he wants to negotiate.  He got a record deal and enough money to set him for life.  It will be fun watching him shoot through the system in the next few weeks, and I will be in line for tickets to his first appearance this September, bank on that.

There are no sure things in baseball, but the hype around Stephen Strasburg will pay the Lerners back just in next year’s season ticket sales.  And we will know just how major-league-ready the young man is within the next few weeks.  Is he the front of the rotation starter the Nationals desperately need right now, or will it take seasoning in the minors.

Those are the kinds of questions we are happy to be asking ourselves this morning.  There is new hope, one very expensive and significant sign of change in Washington.  “Bang, zoom go the fireworks,” Charlie Slowes says on the radio after every Nationals win.  This is the biggest win yet and it deserves some fireworks.