National Sports Journalism Center

First, Ubaldo Jimenez.

Then came Stephen Strasburg.

On seeing these extraordinary pitchers, America’s sportswriters rushed to their local Superlatives R Us stores. There they shopped in the Golly Gee Willikers section.

Once the Yankees beat man at the New York Times, ESPN’s Buster Olney is by instinct and personality a sober, reliable source of information. So I paid attention one day when he began explaining why Jimenez is so good. He said the Rockies ace, in one start, dumbfounded hitters because his fast ball slid sideways nine inches on its horizontal plane. He also said Jimenez’s fast ball moved six inches vertically.

I had heard other bedazzled reporters say the Jimenez fast ball rose.

Now I waited for Buster to say that hitters return to the dugout believing the unbelievable, that they had just seen a Jimenez 100 mile per hour fast ball begin at their shoetops and rise to their eyes.

But Buster’s too good for that. The mistake was mine. I had misinterpreted what he meant by vertical.

"I never said his fast ball rose," Olney told me later. "I just said it moved six inches vertically – down. His best pitch is a sinking two-seam fast ball."

Robert Kemp Adair, a Yale physicist and friend of the late baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti, wrote a book, "The Physics of Baseball." He carefully explained why the laws of physics make it impossible for a pitcher’s fast ball to rise. What happens is an optical illusion. A ball that seems to rise is really only falling less than most. All pitches thrown overhand go down; besides gravity exerting its influence, pitchers throw downward from a raised platform. Over years, hitters’ brains are imprinted with a visual pattern of the ordinary fast ball. But then comes a fast ball delivered at extraordinary velocity with extraordinary backspin. It arrives six inches above its expected place. The hitter’s brain, deceived, tells him the ball has risen. No, it hasn’t. Jimenez’s fast ball just doesn’t fall as much as a 90 m.p.h. heater does.

Saying just that and no more is good enough.

There’s no need to go all mystical, magical, and mysterious.

Certainly, there’s no need to do what was done with Stephen Strasburg.

He’s "Jesus"? He’s "Saint Stephen"? He’s "The Chosen One"? In early June, it’s "Merry Strasmas"? There’s a "Roy Hobbs-like quality" to him? His appearance on the mound in the nation’s capital causes the buzz of "a presidential inauguration"? He threw a curve ball that "went sideways, straight and then sideways again"? What other historic Washington event could match Strasburg’s appearance: Michael Jordan suiting up with the Wizards, Joe Gibbs returning to the Redskins, Barack Obama walking on the Potomac River?

All right, I made up the Obama thing.

But the rest of that paragraph is built on The Washington Post’s reporting of Strasburg’s first game with the Nationals.
More restrained but clearly thrilled by what he’d seen, the Post columnist Tom Boswell, my friend and the best baseball writer alive, called Strasburg’s seven-inning, four-hit, two-run, 14-strikeout, no-walk outing an "obliterate-all-expectations" performance. To say that no-hitters, perfect games, and everybody-goes-down-looking games are possible for Strasburg, or even probable, Boswell invoked the names of Koufax, Ryan, and Clemens. He did stop short of suggesting Walter Johnson reincarnated, but I suspect that’s only because he knew his hero, Shirley Povich, would whisper from the hereafter, "Boz, Boz, please, Boz…."

I am as guilty of excess as any sportswriter ever. It’s Red Smith’s definition of the job. Go to games to have fun and write it up so readers have fun with you. Add to that a touch of human nature in that we all want what we see to be the best ever seen by anyone anywhere. At hundreds of sports events, maybe more, I have waxed rhapsodic to a degree that now brings a blush to my wizened face.

But, really.

Did anyone at The Post notice that Strasburg pitched against the Pirates?

Only Rick Snider, in the Washington Examiner, stepped back from the fun far enough to call them "the lowly Pirates." Lowly, as in being on-pace to lose 100 games. As in being baseball’s worst-hitting team. As in scoring fewer than three runs a game in the two weeks before facing Strasburg. So, by limiting the Pirates to two runs, as Strasburg did, he did about what everyone else had done lately.

That said, there was no denying Strasburg’s brilliance.

Listen to this:

"But you also knew, early on, just how great Strasburg’s stuff was by reading the body language of those around home plate. Time after time, the knees of Pirates’ hitters buckled when Strasburg threw curve balls, and time after time, Pirates hitters were caught flailing at the air with their bats, looking like cowboys trying to lasso a mosquito with a rope . . ."

That’s Buster Olney writing for ESPN.com.

Buster didn’t god-up Strasburg or reach for relevance beyond the field. Alas, anyone searching the Post for that kind of hardball talk came up empty. I wanted red meat, but they gave me eclairs. For instance, there was not a word from the Pirates, as if Strasburg truly had obliterated them – and too bad, because the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s man, Dejan Kovacevic, quoted . . .

Shortstop Ronny Cedeno: "It was nasty, all of it, everything he did. That kid is going to be the best pitcher in the National League."

Second baseman Neil Walker: "If you tried to sit on the heat, he’d throw that curve. He’s hittable, but you’ve got to stay within yourself. And it ain’t easy."

Outfielder Lastings Milledge: "The thing that was most impressive was the curve, the way he commanded that for early strikes. He’s a much different pitcher than anybody I’ve ever faced."

Here’s something I liked very much. Three hours before game time, the Post-Gazette columnst Gene Collier wandered into the umpires’ tunnel under the stadium. He chatted up the national anthem performer, the saxaphonist Jaared. The sax man told the columnist he had thought, "Wow, if I could be there the night Stephen Strasburg makes his debut, that would be something."

So Collier made Jaared his lead. At the column’s end, after Strasburg said it was still just a game, Collier begged to differ. And he did it by ringing that Jaared bell again, using only three words, words that were simple and eloquent.

He wrote, "That was something."

Dave Kindred’s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295