WASHINGTON — Sometimes the sports calendar turns perfectly, as if it knows our national attention is too distracted to enjoy everything at once. So it feels right that the day after Dustin Johnson’s breakthrough U.S. Open victory bled into Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the nation had a chance to breathe and regroup before a historic pitching matchup under the cotton candy Southern California sunset Monday night at Chavez Ravine.
Of course, the best laid plans of baseball fans oft go awry. So it was with the scheduled matchup of Stephen Strasburg and Clayton Kershaw Monday night, which lined up as one for the ages before it even started, until Strasburg was scratched with an upper back strain less than an hour and a half before first pitch.
With the proliferation of national television games and interleague play, there are good pitching matchups available for nearly anyone with an internet connection and an MLB.TV package to watch most days of the week. But this season especially, a number of top aces on likely postseason clubs are turning in such fantastic campaigns that this season offers the promise of more legendary duels, possibly in October, and especially in the senior circuit.
Strasburg has posted arguably his best season to date, although a closer look at his peripheral numbers suggest he’s been the same pitcher as always this year, just perhaps a bit luckier. Through 14 starts, his numbers are almost identical to his scintillating 2010 debut across the board. For a full season, Strasburg has never posted an ERA above 3.46 or lower than 3.00 on the dot, so his 2.90 so far is fairly consistent. Meanwhile, his Fielding Independent Pitching is 2.83, exactly in line with his career average.
But Kershaw has been on another level entirely. He’s on pace to best his Cy Young-winning season of 2014, and his numbers are somehow more impressive across the board. Coming into Monday night, he led the league in ERA (1.58) and strikeouts (133), while throwing the most innings (108). And yet he had walked just seven batters all season, yielding an otherworldly 0.66 WHIP and a double take-worthy 19/1 strikeout-to-walk rate.
In addition to Kershaw and Strasburg, reigning Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta looks to be a mortal lock to start as many games as possible for the league-leading Chicago Cubs. If the Mets can weather the injury storm and right their postseason ship, Noah Syndergaard and his sub-2.00 ERA would likely front their rotation for a Wild Card game showdown against Kershaw, or (if the Dodgers catch the Giants) Madison Bumgarner, or even Miami’s Jose Fernandez, should the Marlins continue to hang around and sneak into the postseason.
We seem to be in something of a golden age of aces. In 2012, there were 10 qualified starting pitchers in the National League with better than a strikeout an inning. This year, there are 26. Numbers like that have skyrocketed across pitching categories over the past five seasons.
So while we may have missed one chance at a historic matchup Monday night, there’s good reason to believe we have others to look forward to as the season gets interesting.
