Yesterday on “First Pitch,” with hosts Rob Dibble and Jim Memolo on Sirius – XM radio they made some news. Former Nationals MASN color analyst Dibble made it known that he did not agree with Washington’s plan of have star pitcher Stephen Strasburg return to the big club sometime in September.
Dibble: “What’s the relevance of having a guy that could possibly get you to the postseason coming back for five starts this year? Well, they want to see if he’s healthy. Well, you know, obviously you know he’s healthy if he’s already going on or he’s about to go on rehabilitation stuff. I mean, they rushed Jordan Zimmermann back, and just because these guys are younger, you know, it doesn’t change the fact that for the most part the majority of Tommy John guys, it takes them 18 to 24 months to be 100% past the surgery. Now you may feel great, you got a new tendon in there, a new ligament, all that kind of stuff, you know, you’ve gotten the injury fixed, but there’s absolutely no reason other than to sell tickets and to put butts in the seats to bring Stephen Strasburg back to make a few starts at the end of the season. He’s too valuable. He’s too talented to even think about stuff like that. But, you know, in their case, having worked with those people the only thing I could say is that there are some people there that think that they invented the game of baseball – which they did not – and that they can do things differently than 29 other teams in the game.”
Dibble: “It’s pretty simple stuff. You want guys to play 15, 20 years, you don’t need to rush a guy back just to get a couple starts in so you can sell out the stadium and stuff like that. They’ve been talking about 2012 and what kind of team we’re going to have and things like that so you know what, if that’s the case and you don’t want to put a Bryce Harper in the major leagues until you think he’s ready, there’s really no point in rushing this kid back just to get a couple of starts out of him for this year.”
As many recall Dibble resigned from his job as a broadcaster for the Nationals last year after questioning Strasburg’s injury before it was found out that he would need Tommy John Surgery.
