"I look at the bright side," Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo said Friday. "Tommy John surgery is a surgery that we've had great success at. The success rate for guys coming back from Tommy John and retaining their stuff is very good. We saw two examples of it on the mound yesterday at Nationals Park."
Empirically, Rizzo is correct about Stephen Strasburg's ability to recover from likely Tommy John surgery. In fact, he may be right even statistically. Look at this list of players in MLB who have had Tommy John surgery. There are plenty of success stories in there. Chris Carpenter. Tim Hudson. Shawn Marcum. AJ Burnett. Josh Johnson. Joakim Soria. Rafael Soriano.
The problem with Strasburg, however, is that the Nationals didn't draft and sign Tim Hudson. Or Shawn Marcum. Or a closer like Soria and Soriano. Rather, the Nationals used the #1 pick of the 2009 draft on what Strasburg's agent, Scott Boras, dubbed a "once in a generation pitcher." Carpenter and Johnson are very good pitchers, but they're not the type of pitcher that comes around every fifty years.
Reality is that Strasburg will return in 2012 and will likely be a very good pitcher. More and more pitchers are recovering from Tommy John surgery with good success, returning with their stuff, as Rizzo said. But, will Strasburg be able to throw 99-100mph in 2012? Will his change up still be 90-91mph? That type of ability seems unlikely to survive a major elbow surgery.
Beyond the obvious impact Strasburg's physical ability, the impact to the Nationals bottom line will be crippling, even at the simple basic level of individual ticket sales. Consider that the Nationals average ticket price is $35 and their average crowd for a Strasburg start is roughly (and conservatively) 10,000 fans larger than a typical home game. At $350,000 a game times the approximately five home starts Strasburg would have left that is a $1.75M loss for the Nationals.
