Washington Nationals: Stephen Strasburg’s Opening Day A Success

For the third time in his career, Stephen Strasburg picked up an Opening Day win for the Washington Nationals and he looked impressive

The intrigue surrounding Opening Day yesterday for the Washington Nationals was about their starter, Stephen Strasburg. How would Strasburg do in his first regular season game where he was pitching solely from the stretch? He ended up having a lot of success in the 4-2 win over the Miami Marlins.

There was something yesterday that was atypical from a normal Strasburg start. He didn’t have many strikeouts (three), but that end up being okay in the long run. Last year, he only had three K’s in one game against the Colorado Rockies, but that ended up being one of his worst outings of the season.

Yesterday, it was a different Strasburg as he did more pitching instead of just throwing. He went seven innings, gave up two runs on six hits, struck out three, and did not walk anyone on 85 pitches (63 strikes).

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Over the first three innings, the 28-year-old right-hander was dominant. Out of his first 40 pitches, 31 of them went for strikes. He retired the first eight hitters in a row with five of those outs coming via groundouts.

If you take one thing away from Strasburg’s first outing of the season, it should be the 12 groundball outs he had against Miami. That is impressive when you consider that last season, he only had three outings in which he has ten or more groundball outs.

In the fourth inning, Strasburg ran into problems with the location on his fastball. While he got the fastball up to 98 miles per hour on the radar gun at times, he had location issues in that inning. Give the Marlins credit for adjusting in that inning to the fastball.

After a leadoff double by J.T. Realmuto, Strasburg threw first pitch fastballs to Christian Yelich and Giancarlo Stanton. Miami ended up getting a run off of those fastballs on a Stanton double. Later in the inning, Strasburg hung a curveball to Marcell Ozuna, which resulted in a RBI single.

Besides the fourth inning troubles, Strasburg was economical and never threw more than 16 pitches in any given inning. In fact, he only got tougher to hit the third time through the order. In total, the Marlins saw 27 pitches the third time through the order and had just one hit (Realmuto single in the fifth).

Yes, one good start doesn’t mean Strasburg is going to win the Cy Young award. However, it was a surprising change for the Nats number two pitcher to not have as many strikeouts and still put up a good performance.

Strasburg trusted his defense to make plays and they did, whether it was Trea Turner at shortstop or Bryce Harper making a catch against the wall in right field in the fifth inning that saved two runs and probably the game.

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All in all, this was a good first outing of 2017 for Strasburg against a lineup in Miami that should fare much better than they did a season ago. It is safe to say that Strasburg’s first start solely from the stretch was a success.

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